blob: acb6f6245d69d405c2e160093626206f254f33f6 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000015- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000016 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000017
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000018- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000019 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000020 which was missing for no apparent reason.
21
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000022- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000023 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
24 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
25
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000026- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
27 types that support garbage collection.
28
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000029- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
30
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +000031- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
32 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
33 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
34 Jython.
35
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +000036- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
37
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000038Extension modules
39-----------------
40
41Library
42-------
43
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +000044- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
45 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
46 when dummy_threading is being used.
47
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +000048- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
49 from a tarfile.
50
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000051- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +000052 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000053
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +000054- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
55 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
56 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
57 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
58
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +000059- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
60 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
61
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +000062- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
63 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
64 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
65 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
66 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
67 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
68 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
69 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
70 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
71 by some other method in progress).
72
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000073- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
74 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
75 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +000076
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +000077- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
78
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +000079- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
80 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
81 AM Kuchling.
82
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +000083- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
84 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
85 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
86
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +000087- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
88 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
89 instead of unsigned.
90
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000091- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +000092 no longer part of the public API.
93
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +000094- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
95 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
96 string methods of the same name).
97
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +000098- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
99 SF patch 982681.
100
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000101- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000102 SF patch 945642.
103
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000104- doctest unittest integration improvements:
105
106 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
107
108 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
109 DocTestSuites.
110
111- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
112 that provide thread-local data.
113
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000114- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
115 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
116
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000117- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
118
119- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
120 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
121 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
122
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000123
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000124Tools/Demos
125-----------
126
127Build
128-----
129
130C API
131-----
132
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000133- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
134 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
135
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000136Documentation
137-------------
138
139Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
140
141 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
142 assigning thier values
143
144 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
145
146 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
147
148
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000149New platforms
150-------------
151
152Tests
153-----
154
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000155- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000156 platforms that use the Makefile.
157
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000158- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
159 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
160 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
161
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000162Windows
163-------
164
165Mac
166---
167
168
169
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000170What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
171=================================
172
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000173*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000174
175Core and builtins
176-----------------
177
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000178- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
179 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
180 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
181 objects now (one object instead of three).
182
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000183- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
184 Windows DLLs.
185
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000186- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
187
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000188- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
189 a new .pyc magic.
190
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000191- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
192 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
193 be there.
194
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000195- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
196 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
197 the LC_NUMERIC category.
198
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000199- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
200 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
201 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
202
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000203- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
204
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000205- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
206 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
207 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000208
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000209- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
210 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
211
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000212- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
213
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000214- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000215 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000216
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000217- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
218
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000219- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
220
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000221- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
222 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
223
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000224- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
225 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
226 Fixes bug #858016 .
227
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000228- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
229 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
230 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
231
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000232- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
233 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
234 improves their performance (about 35%).
235
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000236- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
237 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
238 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
239
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000240- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
241 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
242 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
243 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
244
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000245- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
246 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
247 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
248 length is not known).
249
250- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
251 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000252 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
253 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000254 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
255
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000256- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
257 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
258
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000259- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
260 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
261 keyword arguments.
262
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000263- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
264 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
265 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
266
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000267- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
268 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
269 cases.
270
271- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
272 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
273 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
274 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
275 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
276 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
277 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
278 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
279 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
280 a release build.
281
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000282- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
283 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
284
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000285- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000286 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000287
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000288- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
289 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
290 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
291 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
292 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
293 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
294 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
295 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
296 destroyed.
297
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000298- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
299 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
300 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
301 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
302 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
303 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
304 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
305 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
306
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000307- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
308 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
309 character other than a space.
310
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000311- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
312 by the function object or by the method object, the function
313 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
314 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
315 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
316 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
317 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
318 attributes with the same name.
319
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000320- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
321 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
322 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
323 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
324 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
325 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
326 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
327 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
328 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
329 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
330 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
331 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
332 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
333 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000334
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000335- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
336 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
337 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
338 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
339 This has been repaired.
340
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000341- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
342
343- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
344
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000345- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
346 over a sequence.
347
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000348- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000349 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000350
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000351- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
352
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000353- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
354 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
355 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
356 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
357 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
358 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
359 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
360 records with equal keys is unchanged).
361
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000362- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
363 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
364 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
365
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000366- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
367 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
368 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
369 freelist.
370
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000371- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
372 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
373
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000374- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
375 number.
376
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000377- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
378 a TypeError exception.
379
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000380- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
381 820195.
382
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000383- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
384 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
385 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
386
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000387- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000388 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
389 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000390
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000391- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
392 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
393 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
394
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000395- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
396 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000397 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000398
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000399- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000400 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
401 the first call.
402
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000403
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000404Extension modules
405-----------------
406
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000407- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
408 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
409
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000410- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
411 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
412 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
413 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
414 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
415 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
416 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000417
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000418- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
419
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000420- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
421
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000422- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
423 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
424
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000425- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
426 fewer false positives.
427
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000428- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
429 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
430
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000431- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000432 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
433
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000434- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000435 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000436 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
437 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
438 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000439
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000440- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
441 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
442 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
443 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
444
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000445- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
446 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
447 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
448 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
449 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
450 #897625.
451
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000452- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
453 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
454
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000455- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
456 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
457 and pops on either side of the deque.
458
459- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
460 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
461
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000462- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
463 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
464 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
465 other functions that expect a function argument.
466
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000467- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
468
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000469- os.getsid was added.
470
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000471- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
472 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
473 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
474
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000475- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
476
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000477- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
478
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000479- readline.clear_history was added.
480
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000481- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
482
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000483- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
484
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000485- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
486
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000487- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
488
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000489- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
490
491- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
492
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000493- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
494
495- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
496
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000497- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
498 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
499 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
500
501- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
502 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
503 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
504 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
505 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
506 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
507 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
508
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000509- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
510 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
511 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
512 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000513
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000514- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000515 iterators from a single iterable.
516
517- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
518 of raising a TypeError exception.
519
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000520- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
521 as parameter.
522
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000523Library
524-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000525
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000526- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
527 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
528 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000529
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000530- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
531 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
532 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000533
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000534- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000535
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000536- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
537 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000538
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000539- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
540 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
541
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000542- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
543
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000544- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000545 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000546
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000547- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
548 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
549
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000550- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
551
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000552- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
553 on cygwin and mingw32.
554
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000555- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
556
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000557- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
558 module.
559
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000560- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
561 installation scheme for all platforms.
562
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000563- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000564 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000565
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000566- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
567 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
568 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
569
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000570- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
571 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
572 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
573
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000574- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
575
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000576- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
577
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000578- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
579 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
580
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000581- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
582 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
583 type pattern with the same value exists.
584
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000585- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
586 when run from the command prompt).
587
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000588- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
589 not taken into consideration when caching value.
590
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000591- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
592 default sort).
593
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000594- Added global runctx function to profile module
595
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000596- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
597
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000598- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
599
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000600- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
601
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000602- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000603 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
604 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
605 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
606 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
607 accordingly.
608
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000609- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
610 decoding standards.
611
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000612- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
613 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
614 called for all requests.
615
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000616- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
617 they are passed to the compiler.
618
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000619- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
620 indent, width and depth.
621
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000622- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
623 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
624
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000625- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
626 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
627
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000628- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
629
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000630- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
631
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000632- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
633
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000634- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
635 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
636
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000637- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000638 for better performance.
639
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000640- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000641
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000642- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
643 a string).
644
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000645- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
646
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000647- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
648
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000649- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
650
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000651- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
652
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000653- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
654 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
655 list of fieldnames.
656
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000657- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
658 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
659
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000660- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
661
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000662- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
663 empty lists.
664
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000665- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
666 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
667 and shelves.
668
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000669- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
670 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
671
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000672- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000673 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
674 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000675
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000676- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
677 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000678 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000679
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000680- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000681 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
682 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
683
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000684- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
685 and removed in Py2.4.
686
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000687- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
688
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000689- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
690
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000691Tools/Demos
692-----------
693
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000694- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
695 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
696
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000697- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
698
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000699- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
700 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
701 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
702 destination in situations where both files are given.
703
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000704- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
705 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
706 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
707 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
708
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000709- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
710
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000711- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
712 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
713 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
714 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
715 now.
716
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000717- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
718 in effect
719
720- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
721 C-c C-h
722
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000723- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
724 -d option was given.
725
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000726Build
727-----
728
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000729- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
730 build under OS X.
731
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000732- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
733 --enable-profiling.
734
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000735- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
736 is configured --with-tsc.
737
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000738- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
739 on AMD64.
740
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000741- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
742 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
743
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000744- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
745 removed.
746
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000747- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
748 supported (see PEP 11).
749
750- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
751
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000752- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
753
754- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
755 (see PEP 11).
756
757- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
758 sizeof(char) must be 1.
759
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000760C API
761-----
762
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000763- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
764 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
765 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
766
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000767- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
768 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
769 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
770 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
771
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000772- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
773 generator objects.
774
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000775- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
776 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000777 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
778 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000779
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000780- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
781 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
782
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000783- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
784 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
785 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
786 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
787 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
788
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000789- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
790 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
791 about 10% faster.
792
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000793- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
794 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
795
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000796- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
797 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
798 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
799 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
800
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000801Windows
802-------
803
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000804- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
805 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
806 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
807 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
808
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000809- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
810 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
811 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
812
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000813
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000814What's New in Python 2.3 final?
815===============================
816
817*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
818
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000819IDLE
820----
821
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000822- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
823 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
824 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
825 context-menu actions.
826
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000827- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
828 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
829 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
830 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
831 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
832 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
833 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
834 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
835 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
836
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000837
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000838What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
839=============================================
840
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000841*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000842
843Core and builtins
844-----------------
845
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000846- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000847 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000848 comment at the end are still unsupported.
849
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000850Extension modules
851-----------------
852
853- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
854 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
855 than once. This has been fixed.
856
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000857- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
858 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
859 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
860 call.
861
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000862- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
863
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000864Library
865-------
866
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000867- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
868 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
869
870- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
871 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
872 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
873 restored.
874
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000875IDLE
876----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000877
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000878- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000879
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000880Build
881-----
882
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000883- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
884 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
885
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000886C API
887-----
888
889Windows
890-------
891
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000892- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
893 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
894
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000895- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
896
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000897Mac
898---
899
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000900- Various fixes to pimp.
901
902- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
903
904- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
905 more problems than it solves.
906
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000907
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000908What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
909=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000910
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000911*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
912
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000913Core and builtins
914-----------------
915
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000916- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
917 by sys.setcheckinterval().
918
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000919- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
920 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000921 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000922
923- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
924 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
925 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000926 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000927
928- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
929 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000930
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000931- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
932 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
933 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
934
935- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000936 770247.
937
938- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000939
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000940Extension modules
941-----------------
942
943- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
944 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
945
946- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
947
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000948- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
949
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000950- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
951 contained within the _strptime module.
952
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000953- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
954 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
955
956- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000957 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
958
959- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
960 the find_class attribute, if present.
961
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000962- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000963
964 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
965 (SF bug 763298).
966
967 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000968 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
969 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
970 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000971
972 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
973
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000974Library
975-------
976
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000977- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
978
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000979- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
980 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
981 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
982 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
983 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
984 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
985 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
986 or Tester().
987
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000988- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
989 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
990 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
991 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
992 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
993 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
994 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
995 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
996 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000997
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000998 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000999
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001000- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1001 weren't before was an oversight.
1002
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001003- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1004 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1005
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001006- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1007 when there are no lines.
1008
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001009- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1010 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1011
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001012- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1013 to child processes.
1014
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001015- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1016
1017- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1018
1019- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1020 xmlrpclib.
1021
1022- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1023 responses.
1024
1025- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1026 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1027
1028- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1029 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1030 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1031
1032- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1033 used as patterns.
1034
1035- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1036 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1037 than Tk 8.3.
1038
1039- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1040
1041- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001042
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001043Tools/Demos
1044-----------
1045
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001046- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1047
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001048- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1049
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001050- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001051
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001052Build
1053-----
1054
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001055- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1056
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001057- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1058
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001059- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1060 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001061
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001062- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1063 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1064 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001065
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001066C API
1067-----
1068
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001069- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1070 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1071
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001072Windows
1073-------
1074
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001075- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1076 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1077 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1078 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1079 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1080 Python exception ::
1081
1082 thread.error: can't start new thread
1083
1084 is raised now.
1085
1086- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1087 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1088 instead of from DLL teardown.
1089
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001090Mac
1091---
1092
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001093- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001094 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001095 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1096 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1097 the executable in the bundle.
1098
1099- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001100
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001101- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1102
1103- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1104 on Panther.
1105
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001106What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1107================================
1108
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001109*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001110
1111Core and builtins
1112-----------------
1113
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001114- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1115 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1116 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1117 with the -i option.
1118
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001119- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1120 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1121
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001122- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1123 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1124
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001125- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1126 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1127 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1128 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1129 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1130 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1131 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1132 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1133 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1134 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1135 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1136 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1137 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001138
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001139- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1140 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1141 embedded in a lambda expression.
1142
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001143- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1144 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1145 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1146 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1147 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1148
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001149- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1150 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1151 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1152
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001153- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1154 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1155
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001156- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1157 It's writable again.
1158
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001159- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1160 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1161 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001162 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001163
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001164- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1165 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1166 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1167
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001168Extension modules
1169-----------------
1170
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001171- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1172 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1173
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001174- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1175 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1176 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1177 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1178
1179- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1180 collection.
1181
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001182- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1183 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1184 unique within a single program run.
1185
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001186- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1187 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1188
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001189- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1190 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1191
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001192- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1193 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001194
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001195- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1196
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001197- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1198 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1199
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001200- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1201 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1202 for many BSD-derived systems.
1203
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001204
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001205Library
1206-------
1207
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001208- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1209 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1210 primary ones:
1211
1212 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1213 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1214 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1215
1216 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1217 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1218 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1219 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1220 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1221 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1222
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001223- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1224 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1225 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1226 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1227 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1228 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1229 argument.
1230
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001231- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1232 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1233 in the archive.
1234
1235- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1236 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1237
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001238- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1239 569574).
1240
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001241- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1242 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1243 no more.
1244
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001245- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1246 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1247 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1248 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1249 code coverage.
1250
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001251- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1252 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1253 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001254 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1255 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001256
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001257- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1258 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1259 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001260 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001261
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001262- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1263
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001264- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1265 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1266 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1267 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1268
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001269- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1270 handling.
1271
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001272- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1273 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1274
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001275- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1276 in socket.py.
1277
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001278- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1279
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001280- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1281 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1282 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1283 opener with proxy support.
1284
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001285- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1286
1287- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1288
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001289Tools/Demos
1290-----------
1291
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001292- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1293
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001294- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1295
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001296- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1297 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001298
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001299- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1300 files.
1301
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001302Build
1303-----
1304
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001305- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001306 different root directory.
1307
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001308C API
1309-----
1310
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001311- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1312 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1313 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1314 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1315 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1316 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1317 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1318 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1319 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1320 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1321
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001322- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1323 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1324 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1325 from Python.
1326
1327
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001328New platforms
1329-------------
1330
1331None this time.
1332
1333Tests
1334-----
1335
1336- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1337 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1338
1339Windows
1340-------
1341
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001342- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1343
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001344- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1345 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1346 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1347 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1348 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1349 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1350 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1351 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1352 that's what it's for.
1353
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001354Mac
1355---
1356
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001357- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1358 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1359 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1360 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001361- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1362 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1363- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001364
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001365SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1366------------------------------------
1367
1368430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1369598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1370622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1371661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1372683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1373697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1374713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1375724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1376727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1377729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1378730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1379731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1380732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1381733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1382735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1383740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1384744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1385745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1386747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1387749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1388751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1389753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1390755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1391757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1392760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1393
1394
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001395What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1396================================
1397
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001398*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001399
1400Core and builtins
1401-----------------
1402
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001403- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1404 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1405
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001406- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1407 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1408 and cannot be strings).
1409
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001410- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1411 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1412 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1413 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1414
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001415- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1416 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1417 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1418 Python itself.
1419
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001420- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1421 the referenced object, if it has one.
1422
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001423- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1424 the thread started at
1425 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1426
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001427- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1428 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1429 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1430 placed on a list index.
1431
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001432- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1433 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1434 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1435 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1436
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001437- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1438 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1439 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1440 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1441 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1442 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1443 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1444
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001445- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1446 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1447 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1448 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1449 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1450
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001451- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1452 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001453
1454- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1455 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1456 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1457 #693195.)
1458
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001459- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1460 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001461
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001462- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001463 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001464 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1465 interpreter executions, would fail.
1466
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001467- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001468 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001469 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001470
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001471Extension modules
1472-----------------
1473
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001474- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1475 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1476 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1477 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1478
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001479- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1480 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1481
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001482- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1483 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1484 and Greg Chapman.)
1485
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001486- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1487 recursively.
1488
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001489- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001490 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1491 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1492 leaks.
1493
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001494- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1495
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001496- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1497 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1498 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1499 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1500 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1501 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1502 #705836.
1503
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001504- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001505 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1506
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001507- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1508 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1509 See SF bug #692416.
1510
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001511- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1512 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1513
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001514- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1515 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1516 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001517
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001518- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001519 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1520 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1521
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001522- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1523 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1524 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1525 timeouts to work properly.
1526
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001527Library
1528-------
1529
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001530- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1531 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1532 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1533 future release.
1534
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001535- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1536 for querying platform dependent features.
1537
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001538- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001539
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001540- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1541 pickle protocol versions.
1542
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001543- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1544 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1545 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1546
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001547- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1548
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001549- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1550 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1551 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1552 modules.
1553
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001554- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1555 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1556 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1557
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001558- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1559 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1560
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001561- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1562 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1563 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1564
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001565- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001566 MS Office extensions.
1567
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001568- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1569 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1570
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001571- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1572 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1573
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001574- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1575 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1576 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1577 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1578 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1579 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1580
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001581- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1582 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1583 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001584
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001585- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1586 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1587 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1588
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001589- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1590
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001591- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1592 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1593 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1594
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001595Tools/Demos
1596-----------
1597
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001598- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1599 See the module docstring for details.
1600
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001601Build
1602-----
1603
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001604- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1605 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001606
1607C API
1608-----
1609
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001610- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1611
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001612- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1613 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1614 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1615
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001616- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1617 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001618
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001619 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1620 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1621 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001622
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001623- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001624 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1625
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001626- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1627 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1628 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001629
1630New platforms
1631-------------
1632
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001633None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001634
1635Tests
1636-----
1637
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001638- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1639 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001640
1641Windows
1642-------
1643
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001644- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1645 function.
1646
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001647- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1648 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001649
1650Mac
1651---
1652
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001653- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1654 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001655
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001656- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1657 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001658
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001659- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1660 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1661 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001662
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001663- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001664 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1665 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001666
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001667- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1668 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001669
1670
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001671What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1672=================================
1673
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001674*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001675
1676Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001677-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001678
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001679- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1680 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1681 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1682
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001683- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1684 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1685 (SF patch #664376.)
1686
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001687- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1688 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1689 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1690 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1691 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1692 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001693 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001694
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001695- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1696 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1697 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1698 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001699 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001700
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001701- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1702 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1703 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1704 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1705 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1706 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1707 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1708 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1709 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1710 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1711 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1712
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001713- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1714 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1715 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1716 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1717 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1718 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1719
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001720- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1721 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1722
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001723- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1724 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1725 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1726 case.)
1727
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001728- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1729 passed as unicode strings.
1730
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001731- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1732 See SF bug #683467.
1733
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001734- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1735 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1736
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001737- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1738
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001739- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1740
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001741- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1742 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1743 arguments.
1744
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001745- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1746 See SF bug #667147.
1747
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001748- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001749 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001750 See SF bug #676155.
1751
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001752- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001753 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001754 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1755 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1756 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1757 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1758 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1759 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001760
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001761Extension modules
1762-----------------
1763
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001764- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1765 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1766 tp_as_number pointer.
1767
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001768- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1769 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1770 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1771 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1772 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1773
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001774- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1775
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001776- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1777
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001778- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001779 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001780 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1781 patch #678531.)
1782
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001783- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1784 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1785
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001786- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1787 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1788
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001789- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1790
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001791- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1792 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1793 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1794
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001795- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1796
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001797- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1798 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1799
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001800- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001801
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001802- datetime changes:
1803
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001804 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1805
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001806 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1807 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1808 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1809 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1810 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1811 now.
1812
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001813 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001814 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1815 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001816
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001817 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001818 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001819 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1820 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1821 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1822 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001823
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001824 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1825 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1826 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001827 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1828
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001829 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1830 by a later example coded by Guido.
1831
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001832 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001833 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1834 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1835 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001836 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1837 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1838
1839 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1840 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1841 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1842 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1843 tzinfo subclass instance.
1844
1845 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1846 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1847 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1848 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1849 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1850 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1851 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1852 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001853
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001854 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1855 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1856 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1857 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1858 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001859 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1860
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001861 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001862
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001863 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1864 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1865 as a naive datetime object.
1866
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001867 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1868 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1869 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1870
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001871 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1872 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1873 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1874 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1875 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1876 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1877 comparison.
1878
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001879 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1880 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1881 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1882 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001883 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001884
1885 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001886
1887 and ::
1888
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001889 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1890
1891 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1892 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1893 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1894 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1895
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001896 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1897 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1898 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1899 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1900 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1901
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001902 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1903 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001904 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1905 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001906
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001907Library
1908-------
1909
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001910- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1911 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1912
1913- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1914 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1915 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1916 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1917 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1918 See PEP 307 for details.
1919
1920- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1921 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1922
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001923- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1924 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001925 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001926 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1927 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001928 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001929
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001930- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1931 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1932
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001933- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1934 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1935 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1936
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001937- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1938
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001939- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1940 exception.
1941
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001942- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1943 class.
1944
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001945- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1946 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1947 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1948
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001949- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1950 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1951
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001952- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001953 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1954 See SF bug #659228.
1955
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001956- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1957 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1958 See SF patch #651082.
1959
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001960- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001961
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001962- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1963 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1964
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001965- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001966 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001967
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001968- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1969 DOS paths from other platforms.
1970
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001971Tools/Demos
1972-----------
1973
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001974- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1975 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1976 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1977 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1978 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1979 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1980 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1981 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1982 example:
1983
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001984 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1985 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001986
1987 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1988
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001989
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001990Build
1991-----
1992
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001993- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1994 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1995 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001996 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1997
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001998 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1999
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002000- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2001 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2002 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2003 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2004 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2005 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2006 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2007 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2008 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2009
2010- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2011 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2012 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2013 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2014
2015- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2016 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2017
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002018C API
2019-----
2020
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002021- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2022 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002023
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002024- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2025 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2026 tp_as_number pointer.
2027
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002028- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2029 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2030 (SF #681367)
2031
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002032- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2033 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2034 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2035 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002036
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002037Tests
2038-----
2039
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002040- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002041 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2042 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2043 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2044 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2045 pydoc.)
2046
2047- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2048
2049- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002050
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002051Windows
2052-------
2053
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002054- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2055 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2056 time).
2057
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002058- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2059 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2060
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002061- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2062 release without strong cryptography.
2063
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002064- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002065 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002066
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002067- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2068 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2069
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002070Mac
2071---
2072
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002073- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2074 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002075
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002076- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2077 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2078 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002079
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002080- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2081 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002082
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002083- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2084 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2085 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2086 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002087
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002088- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002089 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2090 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2091 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002092
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002093
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002094What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002095=================================
2096
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002097*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002098
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002099Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002100--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002101
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002102- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2103
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002104- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2105 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002106 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002107 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002108 a different meaning than before.
2109
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002110- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002111 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002112 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002113
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002114- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002115 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002116 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002117
2118- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2119 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2120 and deallocation.
2121
2122- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2123 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2124
2125- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2126 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2127 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2128 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2129 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2130
2131- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2132 now detected by the garbage collector.
2133
2134- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2135 [SF bug 519621]
2136
2137- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2138 identifier.
2139
2140- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2141 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2142 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2143 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2144 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2145 [SF bug 563060]
2146
2147- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2148 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2149 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2150 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2151 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2152
2153- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2154 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2155 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2156
2157- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2158
2159- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2160 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2161 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2162 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2163 state of the slots would be lost.)
2164
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002165Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002166-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002167
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002168- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002169 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2170 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2171 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2172 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002173 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2174 Jython 2.1.
2175
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002176- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002177 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002178 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2179 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2180 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2181 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2182 these, see PEP 302.
2183
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002184- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2185 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2186 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2187
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002188- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2189 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2190 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2191
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002192- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2193 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2194 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2195
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002196- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2197 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2198 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2199 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2200 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2201 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2202 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2203 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2204 releases or implementations.
2205
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002206- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002207 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2208 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002209
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002210- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2211 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2212
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002213- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2214 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2215 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2216
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002217- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2218 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2219
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002220- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2221 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002222 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2223 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002224
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002225- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2226 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2227 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2228 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2229 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2230
2231 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2232 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2233 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2234 pattern.
2235
2236 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2237 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2238 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2239 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2240
2241 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2242 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2243 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2244 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2245 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2246 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2247
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002248- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2249 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2250 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2251 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2252 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2253 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2254 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2255 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002256
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002257- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2258 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2259 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2260 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2261 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002262 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2263 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2264 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2265 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2266 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2267 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2268 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002269
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002270- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2271 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2272
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002273- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2274 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2275 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2276 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2277 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2278 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2279 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2280 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2281 to Zack Weinberg!
2282
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002283- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2284 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2285 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2286 type. This has been fixed now.
2287
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002288- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2289 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2290 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2291
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002292- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2293 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2294 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2295 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2296 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2297 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2298 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2299 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002300 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002301
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002302- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2303 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2304 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002305
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002306- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2307 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2308 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2309 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2310 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2311 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2312 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2313 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002314 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002315 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2316 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2317
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002318- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2319 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2320 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2321 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2322 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2323 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2324 this.)
2325
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002326- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2327 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002328 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002329 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002330 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2331 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002332 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2333 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002334
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002335- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2336 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2337 currently running.
2338
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002339- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2340 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2341 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2342 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2343
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002344- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2345 as directory names.
2346
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002347- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2348 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2349
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002350- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2351 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2352
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002353- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002354 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2355 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002356
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002357- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2358 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2359 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2360 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2361 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2362
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002363- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2364 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2365 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2366 removed.
2367
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002368- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2369 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2370 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2371
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002372- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2373 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2374 to __debug__.
2375
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002376- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2377 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2378 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2379
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002380- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2381 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2382 deprecated now.
2383
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002384- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2385 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2386 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002387
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002388- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2389 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2390 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2391 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2392 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002393
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002394- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2395 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2396
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002397- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2398 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2399 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002400 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002401 is backward compatible.
2402
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002403- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2404 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2405 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2406 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2407 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2408
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002409- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2410 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2411 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2412 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2413 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2414 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002415
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002416- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2417 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2418
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002419- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2420 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2421
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002422- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2423 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2424 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2425 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2426 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2427
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002428- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2429 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2430 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2431
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002432- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002433 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2434
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002435- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2436 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2437 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002438
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002439- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2440 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2441
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002442- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2443 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2444 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2445
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002446- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2447
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002448Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002449-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002450
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002451- Added three operators to the operator module:
2452 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2453 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2454 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2455
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002456- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2457
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002458- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2459 archives.
2460
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002461- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2462 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2463 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2464
2465 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2466
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002467- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2468 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2469 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002470 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002471
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002472- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2473 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2474 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2475 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002476 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2477 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2478 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2479 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002480
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002481- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2482 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002483
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002484- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2485
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002486- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2487 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2488
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002489- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2490 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2491 supported.
2492
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002493- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2494
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002495- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2496 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002497
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002498- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2499 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2500
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002501- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2502
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002503- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2504 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2505
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002506- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2507 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2508 functions but callable type objects.
2509
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002510- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002511 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002512 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002513
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002514- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2515 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002516
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002517- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2518 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002519
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002520- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2521 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2522 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2523 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2524
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002525- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2526 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002527
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002528- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2529 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2530 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2531 and __imul__.
2532
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002533- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002534 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2535 is called.
2536
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002537- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2538 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2539 interpreter was compiled.
2540
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002541- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2542 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2543 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002544 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002545 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2546 1, not 2.
2547
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002548- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2549 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2550 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2551 limit.
2552
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002553- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2554 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2555 bug #623464.
2556
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002557- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2558 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2559 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2560 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2561
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002562Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002563-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002564
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002565- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2566
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002567- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2568 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2569 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2570 with Python 2.3a2.
2571
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002572- os.path exposes getctime.
2573
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002574- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002575 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002576 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002577 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002578 unit tests of floating point results.
2579
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002580- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2581 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2582 has been increased.
2583
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002584- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2585 executed.
2586
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002587- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2588 postinstallation script.
2589
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002590- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2591 test the current module.
2592
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002593- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002594 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2595 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2596 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2597 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2598
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002599- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002600 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002601 Ward's Optik package.
2602
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002603- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2604 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2605 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2606 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2607
2608- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2609 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002610 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002611
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002612- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2613 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2614 shelf are binary pickles.
2615
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002616- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2617 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2618
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002619- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2620 modules are iterators now.
2621
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002622- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2623 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2624 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2625 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2626 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2627 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002628
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002629- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2630 with their entity value.
2631
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002632- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2633
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002634- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2635 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002636
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002637- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2638 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002639 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002640
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002641- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2642 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2643 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2644 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2645 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2646 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2647 main():
2648
2649 import locale
2650 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2651
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002652- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2653 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2654
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002655- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2656 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2657 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2658 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2659 to the new standard.
2660
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002661- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2662 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2663 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2664 an extension to the database.
2665
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002666- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2667 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2668 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2669 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002670 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002671
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002672- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002673 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002674
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002675- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2676 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2677 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2678 bounded integers.
2679
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002680- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2681 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2682 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2683 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2684 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2685 in existence.
2686
2687 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2688 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2689 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2690 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2691 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2692 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2693
2694 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2695 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2696 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2697 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2698
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002699- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2700 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2701 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2702
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002703- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2704
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002705- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2706 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2707 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2708 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2709
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002710- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2711 argument.
2712
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002713- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2714 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2715 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2716 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2717 [SF patch 560794].
2718
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002719- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2720 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2721 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002722 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2723 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2724 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002725
2726- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2727 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002728
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002729- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2730 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2731 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2732 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002733
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002734- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2735 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2736 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2737 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2738 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2739
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002740- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002741
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002742- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2743
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002744- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2745 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2746 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2747 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2748 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2749 identical to None.
2750
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002751- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2752 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2753 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2754 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2755 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2756 results now.
2757
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002758- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2759 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2760
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002761- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2762 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2763 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2764 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2765 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2766 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2767 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2768 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2769
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002770- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2771
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002772- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2773 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2774
2775- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2776 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2777 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2778 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2779 and other systems.
2780
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002781- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2782 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2783 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2784 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 +00002785 work well with these.
2786
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002787- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2788
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002789- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002790 connections.
2791
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002792- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2793 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2794 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2795
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002796- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2797 sets
2798
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002799- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2800 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2801 name.
2802
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002803- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2804 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2805 passed in.
2806
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002807- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002808 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002809 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2810 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002811
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002812- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2813
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002814- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2815
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002816- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2817 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2818 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2819
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002820- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2821 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2822 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2823 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002824 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002825
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002826- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002827 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002828 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002829
2830- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2831 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2832 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2833
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002834- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002835 the value of its expression argument.
2836
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002837- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2838 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2839 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2840
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002841- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2842 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2843 skipstone browser was included.
2844
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002845- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2846 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2847
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002848Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002849-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002850
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002851- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2852 names in addition to accepting file names.
2853
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002854- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2855 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2856 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2857 still used and useful.)
2858
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002859- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2860 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2861 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2862 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002863
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002864- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2865 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2866 the generated binary.
2867
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002868Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002869-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002870
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002871- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2872
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002873- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2874 except in the hands of experts.
2875
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002876- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002877 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2878 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2879 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002880
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002881- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2882 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2883 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2884 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2885 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2886 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2887 builds.
2888
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002889- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2890 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2891 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2892 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2893 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2894 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2895 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2896 new type.
2897
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002898- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002899
2900 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2901 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2902 positive infinities.
2903
2904 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2905 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2906 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2907 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2908 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2909 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2910 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2911
2912 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2913
2914 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2915
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002916- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2917 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2918 size of the executable.
2919
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002920- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2921 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2922 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2923 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002924
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002925- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2926
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002927- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2928 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2929 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002930
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002931- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2932 well as Unix.
2933
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002934- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2935 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2936 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2937 modules in the README file for details.
2938
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002939C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002940-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002941
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002942- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2943 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002944 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002945 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002946 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002947
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002948- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2949 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2950 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2951 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2952 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2953 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002954 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002955 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2956 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2957 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2958 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2959 aligned.)
2960
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002961- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2962 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2963 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2964
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002965- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2966 level.
2967
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002968- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2969 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2970 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2971 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2972 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2973
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002974- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2975 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2976 code.
2977
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002978- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2979 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2980 adjusting for negative indices.
2981
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002982- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2983 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2984 object.
2985
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002986- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2987 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2988 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2989
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002990- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2991 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002992
2993- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2994
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002995- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2996 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2997 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2998 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2999
3000- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3001
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003002- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003003
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003004- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003005 without going through the buffer API.
3006
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003007- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003008
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003009- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3010 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3011 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3012 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3013
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003014- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3015 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3016
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003017- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003018 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3019
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003020New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003021-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003022
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003023- OpenVMS is now supported.
3024
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003025- AtheOS is now supported.
3026
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003027- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3028
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003029- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3030
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003031Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003032-----
3033
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003034- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3035 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3036 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003037
3038Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003039-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003040
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003041- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3042 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3043 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3044 bugs.
3045 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003046 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003047 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3048 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003049 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003050
3051- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003052 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003053
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003054- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3055 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3056
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003057- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3058 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003059 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003060 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3061
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003062- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3063 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3064 use files" uninstall option).
3065
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003066- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3067
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003068- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3069 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3070
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003071- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3072 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3073 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3074
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003075- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3076 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3077 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3078 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3079 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003080 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3081 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3082 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003083
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003084- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003085 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003086 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3087 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3088 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3089 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3090 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3091 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3092 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3093 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3094 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3095 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3096 work around.
3097
3098- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3099 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3100 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3101 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3102 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3103 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3104 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3105 specified with O_CREAT too).
3106
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003107Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003108----
3109
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003110- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003111
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003112- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3113 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3114 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3115
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003116- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3117 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3118 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3119
3120- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3121 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3122 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3123 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3124 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3125 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3126 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3127 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003128
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003129- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3130 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3131 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003132
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003133- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3134 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3135 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3136 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3137 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003138
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003139- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3140 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3141 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003142
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003143- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3144 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003145
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003146- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3147 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3148 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3149 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3150 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003151
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003152- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3153 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3154 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3155
3156- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3157 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3158 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003159
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003160- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3161 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3162 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3163 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003164 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003165
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003166- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3167 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003168
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003169- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3170 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003171
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003172- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003173 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003174 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3175 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003176
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003177
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003178What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003179===============================
3180
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003181*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3182
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003183Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003184--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003185
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003186- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3187 with a custom metaclass.
3188
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003189Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003190-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003191
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003192- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3193 are proxies.
3194
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003195Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003196-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003197
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003198- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3199 very short strings.
3200
3201- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3202 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3203 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3204 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3205 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3206
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003207Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003208-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003209
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003210- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3211 close or delete time).
3212
3213- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3214 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3215
3216- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3217
3218- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003219 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003220
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003221Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003222-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003223
3224Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003225-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003226
3227C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003228-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003229
3230New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003231-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003232
3233Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003234-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003235
3236Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003237-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003238
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003239- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3240
3241- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3242 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3243
3244- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3245 deleted at process exit time.
3246
3247- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3248 in backslash.
3249
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003250Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003251----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003252
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003253- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3254 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3255 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3256
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003257
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003258What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003259===========================
3260
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003261*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3262
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003263Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003264--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003265
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003266- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3267 been extensively updated. See
3268
3269 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3270
3271 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3272
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003273- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3274 deleted!
3275
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003276- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3277 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3278 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3279 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3280 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3281
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003282- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3283
3284 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3285 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3286
3287 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3288 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3289 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3290 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3291 supported anyway.
3292
3293 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3294 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3295
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003296- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3297 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3298 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3299 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3300 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003301
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003302- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3303 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3304 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3305
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003306Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003307-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003308
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003309- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3310 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3311 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3312 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3313 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3314 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003315 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3316 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3317 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3318 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003319
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003320- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3321 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3322 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3323
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003324Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003325-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003326
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003327- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3328
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003329Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003330-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003331
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003332- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3333 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3334 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3335 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3336 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3337 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3338
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003339- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3340
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003341- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3342
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003343- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3344
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003345- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3346 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3347 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3348
3349- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3350
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003351Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003352-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003353
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003354- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3355 off a search on Google.
3356
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003357Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003358-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003359
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003360- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3361 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3362 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3363 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3364 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3365 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3366 other platforms should do likewise.
3367
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003368- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3369 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3370 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3371
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003372C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003373-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003374
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003375- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3376 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3377 producing key-value pairs.
3378
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003379- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003380 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003381 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3382 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3383 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3384 previously went unchallenged.
3385
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003386New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003387-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003388
3389Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003390-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003391
3392Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003393-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003394
3395Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003396----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003397
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003398- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3399 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003400
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003401- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3402 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3403 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3404 home.
3405
3406
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003407What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003408===========================
3409
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003410*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3411
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003412Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003413--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003414
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003415- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3416 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003417
3418 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003419 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003420
3421 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3422 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003423 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003424 This needs to be documented.
3425
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003426- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3427 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3428
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003429- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3430 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3431 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3432
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003433- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3434 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3435
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003436- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3437 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3438 class forbids it).
3439
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003440- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3441 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3442 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3443
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003444- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3445
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003446Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003447-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003448
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003449- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3450 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003451 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003452
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003453- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3454 (like 1 + '').
3455
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003456Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003457-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003458
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003459- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3460 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3461 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3462 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003463 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003464 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3465
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003466- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3467 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3468 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3469 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3470
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003471- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3472 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003473 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3474 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3475 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003476
3477- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3478 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003479
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003480- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3481 bytes on its input.
3482
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003483Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003484-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003485
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003486- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003487 convenience function.
3488
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003489- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3490 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3491 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003492 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3493 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3494 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3495 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3496 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3497 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003498
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003499- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3500 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3501 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3502 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3503
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003504- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3505 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3506 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3507
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003508- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3509 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3510 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3511 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3512
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003513- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3514 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003515 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003516 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3517 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3518 new -l and -e options.
3519
3520- statcache is now deprecated.
3521
3522- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3523 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003524 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003525 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3526 time properly taken into account.
3527
3528- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3529 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3530 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3531 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3532
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003533Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003534-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003535
3536Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003537-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003538
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003539- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3540 is built with libdb3 if available.
3541
3542- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3543
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003544C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003545-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003546
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003547- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3548 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3549 PySequence_Size().
3550
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003551- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3552
3553- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3554 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3555 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3556
3557- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3558 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3559
3560- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3561 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3562
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003563New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003564-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003565
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003566- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3567 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3568
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003569- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3570 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3571
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003572- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3573
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003574Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003575-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003576
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003577- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3578 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3579
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003580Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003581-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003582
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003583Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003584----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003585
3586- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3587 removed completely in the next release.
3588
3589- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3590 OSX.
3591
3592- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3593 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3594
3595- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3596
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003597
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003598What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003599===========================
3600
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003601*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3602
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003603Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003604--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003605
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003606- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003607 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003608 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003609 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3610 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003611 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3612 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003613 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3614 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003615
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003616- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3617 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3618
3619- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3620 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3621
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003622Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003623-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003624
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003625- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3626 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3627 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3628 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3629 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3630 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3631 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3632 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3633
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003634- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3635 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3636 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3637 example).
3638
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003639- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003640 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003641 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003642 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003643
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003644- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3645 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3646 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003647 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003648
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003649- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3650 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3651 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3652 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3653 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3654 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3655
3656 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3657
3658 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3659
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003660Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003661-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003662
3663- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3664
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003665- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3666
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003667- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3668 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003669
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003670- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3671 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3672 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3673 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3674 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3675 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003676 attributes.
3677
3678- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3679 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3680 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003681
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003682- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3683 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3684 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003685
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003686- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3687 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3688 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003689 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3690 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3691
3692- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3693 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003694
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003695Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003696-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003697
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003698- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3699 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3700
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003701- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3702 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3703 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3704 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3705
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003706- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3707 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3708 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3709 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3710
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003711 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3712 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3713 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3714 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3715 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3716 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3717 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3718 without losing information).
3719
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003720- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003721 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3722 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3723 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3724 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3725 module).
3726
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003727 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003728 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3729 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3730 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3731 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003732
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003733- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003734 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3735 encoding.
3736
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003737- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3738 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3739
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003740- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003741 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3742
3743- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3744 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3745 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3746 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3747
3748- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3749
3750- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3751 ON, and OFF.
3752
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003753- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3754 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3755
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003756Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003757-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003758
3759- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3760 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3761 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003762
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003763- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3764 been added: -X and -E.
3765
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003766Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003767-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003768
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003769- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3770 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3771
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003772C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003773-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003774
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003775- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3776 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3777 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3778 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3779 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3780
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003781- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3782 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3783 as long) arguments.
3784
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003785- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3786 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3787 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3788 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3789 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3790 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3791
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003792- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3793 input.
3794
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003795New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003796-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003797
3798Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003799-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003800
3801Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003802-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003803
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003804- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3805 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3806 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3807
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003808- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3809 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3810 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003811 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003812
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003813 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3814 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3815 import signal
3816 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003817
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003818 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003819 while 1:
3820 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003821 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003822 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3823 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3824 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3825 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003826
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003827
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003828What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3829===========================
3830
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003831*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3832
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003833Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003834--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003835
3836- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3837 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3838 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3839
3840- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3841 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3842 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3843 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3844 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3845 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3846 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003847
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003848- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003849 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003850 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3851 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3852 associate a docstring with a property.
3853
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003854- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3855 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3856 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3857 other built-in object types.
3858
3859- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3860 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3861 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3862 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3863 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3864
3865- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3866 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3867
3868- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3869 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003870 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003871 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3872 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3873 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3874 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3875 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3876
3877- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3878 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3879 class.
3880
3881- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3882 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3883 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3884 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3885
3886- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3887 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3888 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3889 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3890
3891- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3892 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3893
3894- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3895 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3896 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3897 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3898 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003899 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003900 with the same value as s.
3901
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003902- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3903
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003904Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003905----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003906
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003907- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3908
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003909- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3910 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3911 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3912 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3913 objects.
3914
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003915- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3916 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003917 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3918 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3919
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003920- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3921 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3922 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3923
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003924Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003925-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003926
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003927- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3928 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3929 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3930 by the instances.
3931
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003932- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3933 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3934 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3935
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003936- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3937 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3938 before the entire comparison is complete.
3939
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003940- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3941 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3942 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3943
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003944- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3945 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3946 getwriter().
3947
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003948- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3949 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3950
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003951- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003952 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3953 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3954
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003955- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3956 iterable object.
3957
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003958- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3959 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003960
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003961- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3962 authentication.
3963
3964- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3965 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003966
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003967- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003968 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3969 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3970 a sample driver.)
3971
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003972Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003973-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003974
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003975- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3976 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3977 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3978 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3979 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3980 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3981 kernel has large file support.
3982
3983- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3984 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3985 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3986 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3987 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3988
3989- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3990 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3991 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3992
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003993C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003994-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003995
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003996- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3997 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3998
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003999New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004000-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004001
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004002- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4003 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4004
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004005Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004006-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004007
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004008- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4009 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4010 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4011 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4012 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4013
4014- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4015 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4016 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4017 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4018
4019- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4020 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4021
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004022Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004023-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004024
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004025- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004026 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4027 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004028
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004029
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004030What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4031===========================
4032
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004033*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4034
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004035Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004036----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004037
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004038- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4039 big to represent as a C double.
4040
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004041- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4042 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4043 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4044 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4045 restriction).
4046
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004047- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4048 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4049 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4050 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4051 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4052
4053 >>> dir([])
4054 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4055 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4056 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4057 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4058 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4059 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4060 'reverse', 'sort']
4061
4062 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4063
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004064- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004065 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4066 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4067 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4068 OverflowError exception.
4069
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004070- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004071 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004072 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4073 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4074 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4075 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4076 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004077 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004078 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4079 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4080
4081 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4082 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4083 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4084 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004085
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004086- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004087 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4088 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4089 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4090 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4091 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4092 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4093 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4094 once it is created.
4095
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004096- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4097 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4098 (key, value) pairs.
4099
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004100- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004101 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4102 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4103
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004104- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4105 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4106 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4107 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4108 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004109
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004110- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004111 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4112 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4113
4114 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4115
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004116- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004117 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4118
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004119Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004120-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004121
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004122- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004123 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4124 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004125
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004126- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4127 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4128 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4129 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4130 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4131 in this area anymore).
4132
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004133- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4134 threading.Timer.
4135
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004136- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4137 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4138
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004139- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004140 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4141
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004142- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004143 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4144 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4145 converted to Python longs.
4146
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004147- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004148 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4149
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004150- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4151 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4152 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4153
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004154Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004155-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004156
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004157- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4158 division operators as per PEP 238.
4159
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004160Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004161-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004162
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004163- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4164 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4165 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4166 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4167
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004168C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004169-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004170
4171- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004172
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004173- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4174 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004175 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004176
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004177 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4178 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004179 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004180 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004181
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004182- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004183 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4184 module:
4185
4186 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004187
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004188 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4189 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004190
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004191 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4192 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004193
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004194 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4195
4196 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4197
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004198- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004199 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4200 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4201 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004202
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004203New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004204-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004205
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004206- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4207 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4208 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4209 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4210 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004211
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004212Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004213-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004214
4215Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004216-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004217
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004218- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4219 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4220 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4221 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004222 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4223 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4224 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4225 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4226 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004227
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004228- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004229 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4230
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004231
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004232What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4233===========================
4234
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004235*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4236
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004237Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004238-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004239
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004240- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4241 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4242
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004243- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4244 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4245 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004246
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004247- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4248 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4249 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4250 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004251
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004252- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4253
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004254- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004255
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004256Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004257-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004258
4259- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004260 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004261 the module docstring for details.
4262
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004263Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004264-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004265
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004266- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004267 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4268 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4269 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004270
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004271- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4272 Nick Mathewson.
4273
4274Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004275----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004276
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004277- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4278 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4279 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4280 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4281 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4282 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4283 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4284 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4285
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004286- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4287 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4288 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4289 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4290
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004291- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4292 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4293 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4294 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4295 come a long way).
4296
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004297- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4298 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4299 write filters for these warnings).
4300
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004301- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4302 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4303 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4304 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4305 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4306
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004307- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4308 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4309 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4310 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4311 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4312 older distribution.
4313
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004314Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004315-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004316
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004317- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4318 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004319 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004320
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004321- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4322 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4323 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4324
4325- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4326
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004327- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4328
4329- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4330
4331- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4332
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004333- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004334
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004335- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4336
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004337New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004338-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004339
4340C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004341-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004342
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004343- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4344 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4345 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4346 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4347 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4348 against buffer overruns.
4349
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004350- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004351 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4352 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004353 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4354 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4355 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4356
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004357- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4358 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4359 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4360 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4361 deprecated.
4362
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004363Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004364-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004365
4366- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4367 relevant is found.
4368
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004369
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004370What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004371===========================
4372
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004373*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4374
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004375Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004376----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004377
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004378- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4379 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4380 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4381 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4382 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4383 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4384 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4385 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004386 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004387 repaired.
4388
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004389- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004390 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004391 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4392 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4393 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4394 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4395 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4396 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4397 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4398 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4399
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004400- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4401 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4402 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4403 leading BMO character).
4404
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004405- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4406 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4407 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4408
4409 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4410 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4411 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004412
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004413 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4414 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4415 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4416 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4417 for various simple to use conversions.
4418
4419 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4420 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4421
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004422 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4423 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4424 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4425 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4426 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4427 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4428 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4429 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4430 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4431 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4432 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4433 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4434 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4435 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4436 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004437
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004438- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4439 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4440 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004441 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004442 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004443
4444 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004445 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4446 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4447 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4448 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4449 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004450 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4451 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004452
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004453 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4454 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4455 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004456 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004457
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004458- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4459 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4460 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4461 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4462 floating arithmetic,
4463
4464 x = 9007199254740992.0
4465 print long(x)
4466
4467 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4468 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4469 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4470 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4471 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4472 functions are of good quality).
4473
4474 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4475 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4476 algorithms to break.
4477
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004478- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4479 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4480 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4481 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4482 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4483 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4484 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4485 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4486 order.
4487
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004488- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4489 operation along the most common code paths.
4490
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004491- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4492 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4493
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004494- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4495 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4496 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4497 {}.update(UserDict())
4498
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004499- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4500 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4501 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4502 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4503 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4504 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4505 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4506 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4507
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004508- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004509 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004510
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004511 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004512 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4513 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004514 join() method of strings
4515 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004516 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4517 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004518 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004519 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004520
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004521- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4522 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4523
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004524- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4525 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4526
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004527- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4528 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4529 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4530 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4531
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004532- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4533 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004534 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004535 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4536 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004537
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004538- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4539
4540
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004541Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004542-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004543
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004544- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004545 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004546 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4547 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4548
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004549- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4550 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4551
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004552- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4553 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4554 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4555 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4556
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004557- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4558 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4559 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4560
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004561- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4562
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004563- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4564
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004565- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4566 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4567 that are still imported into string.py).
4568
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004569- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4570
4571- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4572 Now it does.
4573
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004574- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4575
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004576- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4577 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4578 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4579 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4580 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004581 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4582 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004583
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004584- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4585 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4586 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4587 'help(object)'.
4588
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004589Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004590-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004591
4592- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004593 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004594 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4595 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4596
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004597- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004598 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4599 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004600
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004601C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004602-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004603
4604- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4605 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004606
4607----
4608
4609**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**