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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XXXX-XX-XX*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
15...
16
17Extension modules
18-----------------
19
20...
21
22Library
23-------
24
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +000025- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
26 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
27 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000028- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
29 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
30 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
31 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
32 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
33 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
34 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
35 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000036
37Build
38-----
39
40...
41
42C API
43-----
44
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000045- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
46 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
47 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000048
49Documentation
50-------------
51
52...
53
54Tests
55-----
56
57- test__locale ported to unittest
58
59Windows
60-------
61
62...
63
64Mac
65---
66
67...
68
69New platforms
70-------------
71
72...
73
74Tools/Demos
75-----------
76
77...
78
79
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000080What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
81=================================
82
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +000083*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000084
85Core and builtins
86-----------------
87
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +000088- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
89 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
90
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +000091- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
92 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
93 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
94 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
95 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
96 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
97 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
98 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +000099 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
100 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
101 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
102 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
103 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000104
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000105- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
106 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
107 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
108 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
109 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
110
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000111- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
112
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000113- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
114 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
115
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000116- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
117 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
118 modified the list.
119
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000120- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
121 functions is now writable.
122
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000123- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
124 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
125 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
126 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
127
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000128- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
129 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
130 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
131 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
132 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000133
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000134- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
135 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
136
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000137Extension modules
138-----------------
139
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000140- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
141
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000142- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
143 data.
144
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000145- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
146 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
147 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
148 supposed to have been truncated away.
149
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000150- Added socket.socketpair().
151
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000152- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
153 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
154
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000155- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
156 versions of Python, have now been removed.
157
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000158Library
159-------
160
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000161- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
162 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
163
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000164- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
165 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
166
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000167- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
168 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
169
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000170- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
171
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000172- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
173 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000174
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000175- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
176 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
177
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000178- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
179
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000180- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
181
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000182- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
183
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000184- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
185 Percivall.
186
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000187- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
188 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
189
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000190- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
191 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
192 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000193 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000194
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000195- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
196 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
197 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
198 and exponent.
199
200- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
201
202- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
203 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
204 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
205
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000206- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
207 to the readline module.
208
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000209- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000210 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
211 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000212
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000213- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
214 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
215 contains symlinks.
216
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000217- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
218 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
219
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000220- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
221 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
222 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
223
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000224- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
225 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
226 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
227 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
228 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
229 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
230 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
231 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
232 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
233 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
234 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
235 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
236 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
237
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000238- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
239
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000240Tools/Demos
241-----------
242
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000243- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
244 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
245
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000246- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
247
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000248Build
249-----
250
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000251- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
252 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
253 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
254 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
255 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
256 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
257 plans to do so.
258
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000259- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
260 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
261
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000262- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
263 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
264
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000265- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
266 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
267
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000268- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
269 GNU/k*BSD systems.
270
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000271- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
272 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
273
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000274C API
275-----
276
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000277..
278
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000279Documentation
280-------------
281
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000282- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
283 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
284
285- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
286 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
287 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000288
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000289New platforms
290-------------
291
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000292- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
293
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000294Tests
295-----
296
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000297..
298
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000299Windows
300-------
301
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000302- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
303 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
304 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
305 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
306 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
307 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
308 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
309 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
310 the problem.
311
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000312Mac
313---
314
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000315..
316
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000317
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000318What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
319=================================
320
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000321*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000322
323Core and builtins
324-----------------
325
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000326- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
327 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
328 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
329 sensitive code.
330
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000331- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000332 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
333
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000334 @staticmethod
335 def foo(bar):
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000336
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000337 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000338
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000339- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
340 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
341 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
342 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
343 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
344 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
345 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
346 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
347 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
348 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
349 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
350
351 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
352 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
353 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
354 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
355 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
356 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
357 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
358
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000359- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
360 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
361
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000362- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000363 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000364
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000365- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000366 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000367 which was missing for no apparent reason.
368
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000369- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000370 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
371 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
372
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000373- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
374 types that support garbage collection.
375
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000376- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
377
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000378- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
379 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
380 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
381 Jython.
382
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000383- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
384
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000385- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
386 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
387
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000388- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
389 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
390 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000391
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000392- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
393 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
394 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
395
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000396Extension modules
397-----------------
398
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000399- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
400
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000401Library
402-------
403
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000404- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
405 TIS-620
406
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000407- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
408 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
409 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
410 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
411 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
412 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
413 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
414 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
415 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
416 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
417
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000418- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
419
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000420- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
421 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
422 same as when the argument is omitted).
423 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
424
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000425- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
426
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000427- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
428 schemes are offered.
429
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000430- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
431
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000432- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
433 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
434 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
435
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000436- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
437
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000438- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
439 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
440
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000441- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
442 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
443 when dummy_threading is being used.
444
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000445- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
446 from a tarfile.
447
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000448- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000449 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000450
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000451- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
452 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
453 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
454 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
455
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000456- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
457 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
458
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000459- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
460 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
461 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
462 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
463 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
464 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
465 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
466 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
467 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
468 by some other method in progress).
469
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000470- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
471 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
472 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000473
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000474- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
475
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000476- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
477 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
478 AM Kuchling.
479
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000480- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
481 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
482 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
483
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000484- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
485 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
486 instead of unsigned.
487
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000488- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000489 no longer part of the public API.
490
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000491- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
492 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
493 string methods of the same name).
494
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000495- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000496 SF patch 945642.
497
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000498- doctest unittest integration improvements:
499
500 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
501
502 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
503 DocTestSuites.
504
505- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
506 that provide thread-local data.
507
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000508- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
509 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
510
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000511- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
512
513- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
514 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
515 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
516
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000517- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
518
519 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
520 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
521 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000522
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000523 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
524 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
525 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
526 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
527
528 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
529 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
530
531 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
532 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
533 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
534 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
535
536 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
537 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
538 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
539 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
540 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
541
542 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
543 wrapping help output.
544
545 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
546 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
547 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000548
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000549C API
550-----
551
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000552- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
553 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
554 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
555 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
556 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
557 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
558 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
559 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
560 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
561 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
562 its visible semantics have not changed.
563
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000564- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
565 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
566
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000567Documentation
568-------------
569
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000570- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000571
572 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000573 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000574
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000575 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000576
577 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
578
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000579- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000580
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000581Tests
582-----
583
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000584- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000585 platforms that use the Makefile.
586
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000587- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
588 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
589 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
590
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000591
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000592What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
593=================================
594
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000595*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000596
597Core and builtins
598-----------------
599
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000600- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
601 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
602 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
603 objects now (one object instead of three).
604
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000605- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
606 Windows DLLs.
607
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000608- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
609 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000610
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000611- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
612 a new .pyc magic.
613
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000614- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
615 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
616 be there.
617
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000618- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
619 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
620 the LC_NUMERIC category.
621
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000622- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
623 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
624 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
625
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000626- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
627
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000628- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
629 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
630 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000631
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000632- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
633 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
634
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000635- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
636
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000637- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000638 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000639
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000640- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
641
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000642- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
643
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000644- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
645 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
646
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000647- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
648 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
649 Fixes bug #858016 .
650
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000651- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
652 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
653 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
654
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000655- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
656 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
657 improves their performance (about 35%).
658
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000659- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
660 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
661 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
662
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000663- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
664 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
665 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
666 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
667
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000668- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
669 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
670 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
671 length is not known).
672
673- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
674 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000675 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
676 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000677 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
678
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000679- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
680 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
681
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000682- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
683 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
684 keyword arguments.
685
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000686- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
687 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
688 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
689
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000690- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
691 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
692 cases.
693
694- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
695 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
696 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
697 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
698 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
699 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
700 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
701 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
702 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
703 a release build.
704
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000705- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
706 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
707
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000708- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000709 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000710
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000711- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
712 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
713 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
714 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
715 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
716 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
717 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
718 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
719 destroyed.
720
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000721- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
722 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
723 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
724 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
725 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
726 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
727 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
728 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
729
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000730- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
731 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
732 character other than a space.
733
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000734- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
735 by the function object or by the method object, the function
736 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
737 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
738 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
739 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
740 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
741 attributes with the same name.
742
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000743- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
744 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
745 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
746 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
747 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
748 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
749 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
750 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
751 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
752 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
753 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
754 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
755 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
756 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000757
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000758- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
759 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
760 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
761 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
762 This has been repaired.
763
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000764- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
765
766- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
767
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000768- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
769 over a sequence.
770
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000771- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000772 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000773
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000774- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
775
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000776- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
777 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
778 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
779 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
780 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
781 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
782 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
783 records with equal keys is unchanged).
784
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000785- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
786 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
787 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
788
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000789- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
790 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
791 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
792 freelist.
793
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000794- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
795 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
796
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000797- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
798 number.
799
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000800- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
801 a TypeError exception.
802
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000803- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
804 820195.
805
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000806- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
807 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
808 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
809
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000810- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000811 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
812 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000813
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000814- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
815 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
816 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
817
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000818- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
819 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000820 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000821
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000822- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000823 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
824 the first call.
825
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000826
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000827Extension modules
828-----------------
829
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000830- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
831 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
832
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000833- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
834 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
835 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
836 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
837 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
838 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
839 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000840
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000841- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
842
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000843- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
844
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000845- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
846 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
847
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000848- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
849 fewer false positives.
850
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000851- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
852 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
853
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000854- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000855 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
856
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000857- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000858 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000859 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000860 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
861 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000862
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000863- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
864 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
865 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
866 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
867
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000868- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
869 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
870 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
871 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
872 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
873 #897625.
874
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000875- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
876 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
877
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000878- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
879 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
880 and pops on either side of the deque.
881
882- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
883 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
884
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000885- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
886 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
887 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
888 other functions that expect a function argument.
889
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000890- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
891
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000892- os.getsid was added.
893
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000894- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
895 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
896 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
897
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000898- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
899
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000900- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
901
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000902- readline.clear_history was added.
903
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000904- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
905
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000906- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
907
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000908- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
909
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000910- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
911
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000912- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
913
914- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
915
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000916- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
917
918- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
919
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000920- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
921 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
922 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
923
924- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
925 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
926 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
927 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
928 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
929 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
930 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
931
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000932- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
933 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
934 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
935 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000936
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000937- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000938 iterators from a single iterable.
939
940- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
941 of raising a TypeError exception.
942
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000943- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
944 as parameter.
945
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000946Library
947-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000948
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000949- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
950 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
951 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000952
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000953- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
954 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
955 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000956
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000957- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000958
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000959- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
960 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000961
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000962- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
963 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
964
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000965- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
966
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000967- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000968 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000969
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000970- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000971 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000972
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000973- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
974
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000975- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
976 on cygwin and mingw32.
977
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000978- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
979
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000980- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
981 module.
982
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000983- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
984 installation scheme for all platforms.
985
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000986- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000987 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000988
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000989- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
990 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
991 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
992
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000993- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
994 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
995 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
996
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000997- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
998
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000999- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1000
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001001- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1002 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1003
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001004- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1005 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1006 type pattern with the same value exists.
1007
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001008- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1009 when run from the command prompt).
1010
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001011- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1012 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1013
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001014- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1015 default sort).
1016
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001017- Added global runctx function to profile module
1018
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001019- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1020
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001021- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1022
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001023- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1024
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001025- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001026 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1027 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1028 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1029 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1030 accordingly.
1031
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001032- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1033 decoding standards.
1034
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001035- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1036 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1037 called for all requests.
1038
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001039- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1040 they are passed to the compiler.
1041
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001042- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1043 indent, width and depth.
1044
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001045- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1046 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1047
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001048- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1049 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1050
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001051- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1052
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001053- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1054
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001055- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1056
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001057- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1058 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1059
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001060- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001061 for better performance.
1062
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001063- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001064
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001065- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1066 a string).
1067
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001068- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1069
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001070- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1071
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001072- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1073
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001074- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1075
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001076- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1077 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1078 list of fieldnames.
1079
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001080- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1081 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1082
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001083- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1084
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001085- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1086 empty lists.
1087
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001088- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1089 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1090 and shelves.
1091
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001092- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1093 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1094
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001095- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001096 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1097 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001098
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001099- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1100 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001101 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001102
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001103- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001104 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1105 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1106
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001107- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1108 and removed in Py2.4.
1109
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001110- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1111
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001112- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1113
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001114Tools/Demos
1115-----------
1116
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001117- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1118 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1119
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001120- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1121
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001122- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1123 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1124 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1125 destination in situations where both files are given.
1126
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001127- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1128 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1129 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1130 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1131
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001132- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1133
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001134- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1135 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1136 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1137 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1138 now.
1139
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001140- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1141 in effect
1142
1143- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1144 C-c C-h
1145
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001146- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1147 -d option was given.
1148
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001149Build
1150-----
1151
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001152- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1153 build under OS X.
1154
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001155- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1156 --enable-profiling.
1157
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001158- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1159 is configured --with-tsc.
1160
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001161- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1162 on AMD64.
1163
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001164- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1165 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1166
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001167- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1168 removed.
1169
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001170- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1171 supported (see PEP 11).
1172
1173- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1174
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001175- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1176
1177- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1178 (see PEP 11).
1179
1180- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1181 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1182
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001183C API
1184-----
1185
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001186- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1187 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1188 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1189
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001190- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1191 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1192 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1193 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1194
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001195- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1196 generator objects.
1197
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001198- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1199 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001200 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1201 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001202
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001203- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1204 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1205
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001206- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1207 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1208 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1209 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1210 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1211
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001212- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1213 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1214 about 10% faster.
1215
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001216- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1217 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1218
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001219- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1220 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1221 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1222 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1223
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001224Windows
1225-------
1226
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001227- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1228 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1229 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1230 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1231
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001232- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1233 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1234 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1235
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001236
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001237What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1238===============================
1239
1240*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1241
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001242IDLE
1243----
1244
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001245- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1246 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1247 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1248 context-menu actions.
1249
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001250- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1251 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1252 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1253 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1254 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1255 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1256 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1257 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1258 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1259
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001260
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001261What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1262=============================================
1263
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001264*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001265
1266Core and builtins
1267-----------------
1268
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001269- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001270 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001271 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1272
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001273Extension modules
1274-----------------
1275
1276- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1277 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1278 than once. This has been fixed.
1279
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001280- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1281 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1282 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1283 call.
1284
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001285- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1286
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001287Library
1288-------
1289
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001290- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1291 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1292
1293- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1294 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1295 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1296 restored.
1297
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001298IDLE
1299----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001300
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001301- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001302
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001303Build
1304-----
1305
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001306- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1307 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1308
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001309C API
1310-----
1311
1312Windows
1313-------
1314
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001315- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1316 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1317
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001318- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1319
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001320Mac
1321---
1322
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001323- Various fixes to pimp.
1324
1325- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1326
1327- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1328 more problems than it solves.
1329
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001330
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001331What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1332=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001333
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001334*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1335
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001336Core and builtins
1337-----------------
1338
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001339- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1340 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1341
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001342- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1343 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001344 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001345
1346- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1347 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1348 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001349 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001350
1351- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1352 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001353
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001354- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1355 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1356 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1357
1358- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001359 770247.
1360
1361- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001362
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001363Extension modules
1364-----------------
1365
1366- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1367 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1368
1369- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1370
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001371- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1372
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001373- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1374 contained within the _strptime module.
1375
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001376- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1377 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1378
1379- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001380 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1381
1382- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1383 the find_class attribute, if present.
1384
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001385- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001386
1387 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1388 (SF bug 763298).
1389
1390 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001391 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1392 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1393 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001394
1395 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1396
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001397Library
1398-------
1399
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001400- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1401
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001402- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1403 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1404 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1405 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1406 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1407 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1408 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1409 or Tester().
1410
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001411- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1412 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1413 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1414 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1415 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1416 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1417 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1418 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1419 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001420
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001421 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001422
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001423- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1424 weren't before was an oversight.
1425
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001426- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1427 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1428
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001429- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1430 when there are no lines.
1431
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001432- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1433 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1434
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001435- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1436 to child processes.
1437
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001438- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1439
1440- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1441
1442- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1443 xmlrpclib.
1444
1445- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1446 responses.
1447
1448- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1449 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1450
1451- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1452 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1453 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1454
1455- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1456 used as patterns.
1457
1458- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1459 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1460 than Tk 8.3.
1461
1462- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1463
1464- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001465
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001466Tools/Demos
1467-----------
1468
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001469- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1470
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001471- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1472
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001473- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001474
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001475Build
1476-----
1477
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001478- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1479
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001480- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1481
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001482- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1483 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001484
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001485- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1486 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1487 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001488
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001489C API
1490-----
1491
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001492- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1493 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1494
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001495Windows
1496-------
1497
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001498- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1499 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1500 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1501 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1502 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1503 Python exception ::
1504
1505 thread.error: can't start new thread
1506
1507 is raised now.
1508
1509- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1510 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1511 instead of from DLL teardown.
1512
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001513Mac
1514---
1515
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001516- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001517 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001518 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1519 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1520 the executable in the bundle.
1521
1522- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001523
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001524- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1525
1526- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1527 on Panther.
1528
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001529What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1530================================
1531
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001532*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001533
1534Core and builtins
1535-----------------
1536
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001537- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1538 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1539 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1540 with the -i option.
1541
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001542- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1543 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1544
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001545- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1546 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1547
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001548- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1549 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1550 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1551 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1552 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1553 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1554 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1555 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1556 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1557 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1558 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1559 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1560 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001561
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001562- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1563 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1564 embedded in a lambda expression.
1565
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001566- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1567 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1568 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1569 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1570 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1571
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001572- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1573 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1574 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1575
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001576- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1577 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1578
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001579- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1580 It's writable again.
1581
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001582- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1583 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1584 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001585 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001586
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001587- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1588 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1589 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1590
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001591Extension modules
1592-----------------
1593
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001594- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1595 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1596
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001597- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1598 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1599 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1600 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1601
1602- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1603 collection.
1604
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001605- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1606 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1607 unique within a single program run.
1608
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001609- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1610 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1611
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001612- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1613 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1614
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001615- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1616 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001617
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001618- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1619
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001620- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1621 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1622
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001623- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1624 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1625 for many BSD-derived systems.
1626
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001627
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001628Library
1629-------
1630
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001631- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1632 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1633 primary ones:
1634
1635 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1636 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1637 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1638
1639 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1640 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1641 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1642 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1643 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1644 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1645
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001646- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1647 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1648 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1649 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1650 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1651 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1652 argument.
1653
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001654- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1655 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1656 in the archive.
1657
1658- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1659 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1660
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001661- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1662 569574).
1663
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001664- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1665 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1666 no more.
1667
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001668- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1669 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1670 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1671 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1672 code coverage.
1673
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001674- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1675 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1676 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001677 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1678 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001679
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001680- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1681 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1682 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001683 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001684
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001685- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1686
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001687- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1688 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1689 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1690 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1691
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001692- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1693 handling.
1694
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001695- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1696 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1697
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001698- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1699 in socket.py.
1700
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001701- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1702
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001703- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1704 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1705 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1706 opener with proxy support.
1707
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001708- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1709
1710- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1711
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001712Tools/Demos
1713-----------
1714
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001715- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1716
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001717- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1718
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001719- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1720 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001721
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001722- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1723 files.
1724
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001725Build
1726-----
1727
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001728- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001729 different root directory.
1730
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001731C API
1732-----
1733
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001734- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1735 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1736 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1737 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1738 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1739 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1740 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1741 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1742 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1743 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1744
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001745- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1746 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1747 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1748 from Python.
1749
1750
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001751New platforms
1752-------------
1753
1754None this time.
1755
1756Tests
1757-----
1758
1759- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1760 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1761
1762Windows
1763-------
1764
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001765- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1766
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001767- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1768 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1769 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1770 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1771 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1772 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1773 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1774 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1775 that's what it's for.
1776
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001777Mac
1778---
1779
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001780- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1781 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1782 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1783 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001784- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1785 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1786- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001787
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001788SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1789------------------------------------
1790
1791430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1792598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1793622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1794661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1795683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1796697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1797713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1798724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1799727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1800729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1801730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1802731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1803732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1804733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1805735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1806740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1807744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1808745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1809747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1810749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1811751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1812753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1813755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1814757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1815760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1816
1817
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001818What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1819================================
1820
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001821*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001822
1823Core and builtins
1824-----------------
1825
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001826- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1827 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1828
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001829- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1830 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1831 and cannot be strings).
1832
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001833- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1834 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1835 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1836 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1837
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001838- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1839 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1840 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1841 Python itself.
1842
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001843- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1844 the referenced object, if it has one.
1845
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001846- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1847 the thread started at
1848 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1849
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001850- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1851 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1852 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1853 placed on a list index.
1854
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001855- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1856 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1857 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1858 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1859
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001860- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1861 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1862 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1863 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1864 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1865 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1866 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1867
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001868- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1869 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1870 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1871 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1872 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1873
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001874- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1875 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001876
1877- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1878 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1879 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1880 #693195.)
1881
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001882- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1883 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001884
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001885- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001886 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001887 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1888 interpreter executions, would fail.
1889
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001890- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001891 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001892 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001893
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001894Extension modules
1895-----------------
1896
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001897- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1898 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1899 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1900 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1901
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001902- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1903 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1904
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001905- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1906 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1907 and Greg Chapman.)
1908
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001909- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1910 recursively.
1911
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001912- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001913 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1914 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1915 leaks.
1916
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001917- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1918
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001919- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1920 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1921 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1922 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1923 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1924 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1925 #705836.
1926
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001927- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001928 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1929
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001930- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1931 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1932 See SF bug #692416.
1933
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001934- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1935 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1936
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001937- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1938 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1939 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001940
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001941- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001942 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1943 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1944
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001945- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1946 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1947 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1948 timeouts to work properly.
1949
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001950Library
1951-------
1952
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001953- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1954 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1955 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1956 future release.
1957
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001958- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1959 for querying platform dependent features.
1960
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001961- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001962
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001963- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1964 pickle protocol versions.
1965
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001966- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1967 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1968 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1969
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001970- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1971
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001972- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1973 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1974 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1975 modules.
1976
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001977- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1978 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1979 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1980
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001981- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1982 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1983
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001984- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1985 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1986 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1987
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001988- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001989 MS Office extensions.
1990
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001991- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1992 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1993
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001994- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1995 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1996
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001997- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1998 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1999 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2000 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2001 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2002 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2003
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002004- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2005 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2006 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002007
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002008- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2009 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2010 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2011
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002012- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2013
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002014- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2015 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2016 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2017
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002018Tools/Demos
2019-----------
2020
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002021- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2022 See the module docstring for details.
2023
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002024Build
2025-----
2026
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002027- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2028 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002029
2030C API
2031-----
2032
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002033- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2034
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002035- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2036 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2037 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2038
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002039- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2040 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002041
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002042 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2043 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2044 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002045
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002046- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002047 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2048
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002049- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2050 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2051 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002052
2053New platforms
2054-------------
2055
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002056None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002057
2058Tests
2059-----
2060
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002061- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2062 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002063
2064Windows
2065-------
2066
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002067- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2068 function.
2069
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002070- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2071 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002072
2073Mac
2074---
2075
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002076- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2077 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002078
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002079- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2080 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002081
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002082- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2083 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2084 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002085
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002086- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002087 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2088 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002089
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002090- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2091 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002092
2093
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002094What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2095=================================
2096
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002097*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002098
2099Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002100-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002101
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002102- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2103 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2104 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2105
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002106- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2107 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2108 (SF patch #664376.)
2109
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002110- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2111 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2112 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2113 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2114 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2115 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002116 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002117
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002118- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2119 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2120 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2121 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002122 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002123
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002124- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2125 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2126 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2127 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2128 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2129 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2130 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2131 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2132 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2133 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2134 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2135
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002136- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2137 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2138 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2139 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2140 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2141 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2142
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002143- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2144 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2145
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002146- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2147 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2148 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2149 case.)
2150
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002151- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2152 passed as unicode strings.
2153
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002154- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2155 See SF bug #683467.
2156
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002157- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2158 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2159
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002160- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2161
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002162- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2163
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002164- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2165 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2166 arguments.
2167
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002168- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2169 See SF bug #667147.
2170
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002171- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002172 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002173 See SF bug #676155.
2174
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002175- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002176 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002177 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2178 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2179 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2180 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2181 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2182 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002183
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002184Extension modules
2185-----------------
2186
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002187- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2188 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2189 tp_as_number pointer.
2190
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002191- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2192 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2193 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2194 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2195 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2196
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002197- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2198
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002199- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2200
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002201- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002202 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002203 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2204 patch #678531.)
2205
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002206- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2207 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2208
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002209- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2210 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2211
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002212- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2213
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002214- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2215 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2216 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2217
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002218- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2219
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002220- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2221 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2222
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002223- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002224
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002225- datetime changes:
2226
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002227 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2228
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002229 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2230 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2231 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2232 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2233 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2234 now.
2235
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002236 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002237 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2238 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002239
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002240 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002241 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002242 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2243 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2244 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2245 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002246
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002247 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2248 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2249 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002250 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2251
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002252 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2253 by a later example coded by Guido.
2254
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002255 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002256 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2257 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2258 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002259 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2260 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2261
2262 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2263 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2264 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2265 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2266 tzinfo subclass instance.
2267
2268 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2269 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2270 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2271 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2272 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2273 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2274 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2275 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002276
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002277 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2278 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2279 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2280 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2281 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002282 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2283
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002284 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002285
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002286 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2287 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2288 as a naive datetime object.
2289
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002290 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2291 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2292 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2293
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002294 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2295 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2296 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2297 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2298 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2299 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2300 comparison.
2301
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002302 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2303 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2304 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2305 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002306 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002307
2308 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002309
2310 and ::
2311
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002312 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2313
2314 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2315 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2316 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2317 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2318
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002319 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2320 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2321 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2322 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2323 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2324
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002325 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2326 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002327 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2328 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002329
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002330Library
2331-------
2332
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002333- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2334 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2335
2336- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2337 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2338 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2339 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2340 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2341 See PEP 307 for details.
2342
2343- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2344 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2345
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002346- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2347 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002348 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002349 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2350 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002351 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002352
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002353- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2354 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2355
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002356- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2357 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2358 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2359
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002360- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2361
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002362- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2363 exception.
2364
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002365- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2366 class.
2367
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002368- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2369 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2370 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2371
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002372- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2373 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2374
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002375- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002376 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2377 See SF bug #659228.
2378
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002379- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2380 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2381 See SF patch #651082.
2382
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002383- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002384
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002385- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2386 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2387
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002388- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002389 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002390
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002391- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2392 DOS paths from other platforms.
2393
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002394Tools/Demos
2395-----------
2396
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002397- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2398 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2399 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2400 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2401 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2402 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2403 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2404 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2405 example:
2406
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002407 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2408 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002409
2410 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2411
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002412
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002413Build
2414-----
2415
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002416- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2417 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2418 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002419 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2420
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002421 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2422
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002423- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2424 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2425 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2426 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2427 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2428 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2429 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2430 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2431 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2432
2433- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2434 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2435 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2436 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2437
2438- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2439 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2440
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002441C API
2442-----
2443
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002444- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2445 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002446
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002447- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2448 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2449 tp_as_number pointer.
2450
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002451- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2452 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2453 (SF #681367)
2454
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002455- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2456 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2457 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2458 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002459
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002460Tests
2461-----
2462
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002463- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002464 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2465 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2466 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2467 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2468 pydoc.)
2469
2470- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2471
2472- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002473
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002474Windows
2475-------
2476
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002477- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2478 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2479 time).
2480
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002481- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2482 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2483
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002484- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2485 release without strong cryptography.
2486
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002487- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002488 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002489
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002490- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2491 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2492
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002493Mac
2494---
2495
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002496- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2497 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002498
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002499- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2500 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2501 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002502
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002503- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2504 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002505
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002506- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2507 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2508 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2509 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002510
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002511- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002512 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2513 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2514 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002515
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002516
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002517What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002518=================================
2519
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002520*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002521
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002522Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002523--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002524
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002525- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2526
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002527- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2528 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002529 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002530 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002531 a different meaning than before.
2532
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002533- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002534 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002535 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002536
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002537- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002538 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002539 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002540
2541- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2542 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2543 and deallocation.
2544
2545- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2546 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2547
2548- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2549 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2550 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2551 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2552 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2553
2554- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2555 now detected by the garbage collector.
2556
2557- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2558 [SF bug 519621]
2559
2560- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2561 identifier.
2562
2563- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2564 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2565 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2566 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2567 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2568 [SF bug 563060]
2569
2570- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2571 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2572 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2573 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2574 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2575
2576- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2577 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2578 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2579
2580- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2581
2582- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2583 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2584 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2585 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2586 state of the slots would be lost.)
2587
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002588Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002589-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002590
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002591- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002592 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2593 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2594 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2595 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002596 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2597 Jython 2.1.
2598
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002599- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002600 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002601 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2602 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2603 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2604 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2605 these, see PEP 302.
2606
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002607- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2608 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2609 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2610
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002611- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2612 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2613 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2614
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002615- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2616 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2617 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2618
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002619- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2620 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2621 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2622 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2623 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2624 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2625 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2626 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2627 releases or implementations.
2628
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002629- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002630 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2631 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002632
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002633- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2634 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2635
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002636- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2637 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2638 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2639
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002640- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2641 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2642
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002643- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2644 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002645 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2646 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002647
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002648- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2649 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2650 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2651 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2652 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2653
2654 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2655 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2656 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2657 pattern.
2658
2659 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2660 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2661 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2662 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2663
2664 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2665 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2666 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2667 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2668 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2669 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2670
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002671- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2672 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2673 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2674 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2675 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2676 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2677 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2678 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002679
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002680- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2681 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2682 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2683 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2684 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002685 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2686 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2687 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2688 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2689 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2690 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2691 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002692
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002693- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2694 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2695
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002696- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2697 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2698 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2699 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2700 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2701 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2702 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2703 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2704 to Zack Weinberg!
2705
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002706- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2707 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2708 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2709 type. This has been fixed now.
2710
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002711- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2712 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2713 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2714
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002715- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2716 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2717 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2718 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2719 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2720 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2721 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2722 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002723 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002724
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002725- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2726 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2727 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002728
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002729- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2730 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2731 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2732 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2733 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2734 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2735 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2736 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002737 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002738 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2739 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2740
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002741- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2742 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2743 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2744 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2745 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2746 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2747 this.)
2748
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002749- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2750 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002751 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002752 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002753 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2754 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002755 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2756 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002757
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002758- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2759 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2760 currently running.
2761
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002762- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2763 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2764 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2765 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2766
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002767- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2768 as directory names.
2769
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002770- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2771 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2772
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002773- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2774 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2775
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002776- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002777 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2778 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002779
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002780- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2781 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2782 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2783 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2784 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2785
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002786- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2787 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2788 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2789 removed.
2790
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002791- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2792 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2793 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2794
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002795- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2796 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2797 to __debug__.
2798
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002799- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2800 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2801 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2802
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002803- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2804 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2805 deprecated now.
2806
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002807- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2808 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2809 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002810
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002811- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2812 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2813 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2814 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2815 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002816
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002817- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2818 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2819
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002820- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2821 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2822 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002823 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002824 is backward compatible.
2825
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002826- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2827 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2828 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2829 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2830 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2831
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002832- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2833 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2834 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2835 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2836 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2837 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002838
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002839- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2840 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2841
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002842- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2843 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2844
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002845- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2846 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2847 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2848 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2849 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2850
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002851- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2852 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2853 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2854
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002855- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002856 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2857
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002858- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2859 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2860 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002861
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002862- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2863 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2864
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002865- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2866 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2867 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2868
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002869- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2870
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002871Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002872-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002873
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002874- Added three operators to the operator module:
2875 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2876 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2877 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2878
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002879- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2880
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002881- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2882 archives.
2883
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002884- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2885 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2886 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2887
2888 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2889
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002890- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2891 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2892 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002893 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002894
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002895- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2896 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2897 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2898 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002899 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2900 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2901 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2902 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002903
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002904- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2905 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002906
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002907- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2908
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002909- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2910 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2911
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002912- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2913 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2914 supported.
2915
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002916- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2917
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002918- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2919 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002920
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002921- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2922 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2923
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002924- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2925
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002926- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2927 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2928
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002929- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2930 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2931 functions but callable type objects.
2932
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002933- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002934 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002935 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002936
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002937- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2938 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002939
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002940- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2941 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002942
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002943- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2944 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2945 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2946 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2947
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002948- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2949 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002950
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002951- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2952 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2953 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2954 and __imul__.
2955
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002956- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002957 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2958 is called.
2959
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002960- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2961 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2962 interpreter was compiled.
2963
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002964- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2965 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2966 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002967 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002968 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2969 1, not 2.
2970
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002971- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2972 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2973 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2974 limit.
2975
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002976- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2977 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2978 bug #623464.
2979
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002980- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2981 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2982 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2983 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2984
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002985Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002986-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002987
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002988- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2989
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002990- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2991 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2992 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2993 with Python 2.3a2.
2994
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002995- os.path exposes getctime.
2996
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002997- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002998 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002999 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003000 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003001 unit tests of floating point results.
3002
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003003- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3004 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3005 has been increased.
3006
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003007- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3008 executed.
3009
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003010- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3011 postinstallation script.
3012
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003013- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3014 test the current module.
3015
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003016- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003017 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3018 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3019 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3020 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3021
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003022- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003023 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003024 Ward's Optik package.
3025
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003026- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3027 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3028 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3029 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3030
3031- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3032 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003033 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003034
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003035- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3036 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3037 shelf are binary pickles.
3038
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003039- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3040 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3041
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003042- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3043 modules are iterators now.
3044
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003045- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3046 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3047 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3048 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3049 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3050 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003051
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003052- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3053 with their entity value.
3054
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003055- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3056
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003057- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3058 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003059
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003060- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3061 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003062 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003063
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003064- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3065 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3066 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3067 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3068 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3069 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3070 main():
3071
3072 import locale
3073 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3074
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003075- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3076 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3077
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003078- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3079 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3080 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3081 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3082 to the new standard.
3083
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003084- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3085 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3086 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3087 an extension to the database.
3088
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003089- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3090 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3091 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3092 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003093 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003094
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003095- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003096 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003097
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003098- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3099 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3100 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3101 bounded integers.
3102
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003103- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3104 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3105 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3106 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3107 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3108 in existence.
3109
3110 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3111 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3112 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3113 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3114 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3115 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3116
3117 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3118 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3119 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3120 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3121
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003122- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3123 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3124 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3125
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003126- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3127
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003128- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3129 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3130 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3131 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3132
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003133- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3134 argument.
3135
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003136- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3137 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3138 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3139 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3140 [SF patch 560794].
3141
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003142- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3143 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3144 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003145 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3146 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3147 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003148
3149- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3150 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003151
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003152- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3153 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3154 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3155 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003156
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003157- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3158 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3159 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3160 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3161 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3162
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003163- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003164
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003165- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3166
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003167- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3168 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3169 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3170 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3171 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3172 identical to None.
3173
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003174- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3175 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3176 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3177 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3178 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3179 results now.
3180
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003181- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3182 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3183
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003184- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3185 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3186 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3187 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3188 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3189 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3190 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3191 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3192
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003193- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3194
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003195- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3196 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3197
3198- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3199 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3200 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3201 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3202 and other systems.
3203
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003204- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3205 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3206 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3207 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 +00003208 work well with these.
3209
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003210- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3211
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003212- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003213 connections.
3214
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003215- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3216 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3217 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3218
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003219- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3220 sets
3221
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003222- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3223 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3224 name.
3225
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003226- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3227 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3228 passed in.
3229
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003230- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003231 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003232 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3233 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003234
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003235- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3236
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003237- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3238
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003239- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3240 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3241 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3242
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003243- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3244 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3245 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3246 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003247 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003248
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003249- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003250 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003251 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003252
3253- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3254 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3255 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3256
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003257- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003258 the value of its expression argument.
3259
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003260- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3261 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3262 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3263
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003264- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3265 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3266 skipstone browser was included.
3267
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003268- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3269 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3270
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003271Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003272-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003273
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003274- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3275 names in addition to accepting file names.
3276
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003277- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3278 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3279 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3280 still used and useful.)
3281
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003282- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3283 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3284 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3285 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003286
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003287- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3288 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3289 the generated binary.
3290
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003291Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003292-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003293
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003294- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3295
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003296- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3297 except in the hands of experts.
3298
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003299- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003300 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3301 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3302 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003303
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003304- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3305 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3306 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3307 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3308 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3309 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3310 builds.
3311
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003312- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3313 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3314 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3315 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3316 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3317 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3318 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3319 new type.
3320
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003321- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003322
3323 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3324 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3325 positive infinities.
3326
3327 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3328 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3329 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3330 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3331 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3332 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3333 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3334
3335 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3336
3337 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3338
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003339- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3340 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3341 size of the executable.
3342
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003343- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3344 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3345 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3346 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003347
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003348- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3349
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003350- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3351 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3352 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003353
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003354- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3355 well as Unix.
3356
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003357- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3358 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3359 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3360 modules in the README file for details.
3361
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003362C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003363-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003364
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003365- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3366 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003367 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003368 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003369 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003370
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003371- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3372 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3373 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3374 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3375 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3376 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003377 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003378 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3379 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3380 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3381 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3382 aligned.)
3383
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003384- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3385 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3386 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3387
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003388- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3389 level.
3390
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003391- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3392 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3393 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3394 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3395 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3396
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003397- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3398 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3399 code.
3400
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003401- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3402 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3403 adjusting for negative indices.
3404
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003405- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3406 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3407 object.
3408
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003409- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3410 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3411 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3412
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003413- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3414 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003415
3416- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3417
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003418- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3419 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3420 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3421 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3422
3423- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3424
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003425- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003426
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003427- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003428 without going through the buffer API.
3429
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003430- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003431
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003432- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3433 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3434 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3435 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3436
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003437- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3438 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3439
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003440- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003441 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3442
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003443New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003444-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003445
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003446- OpenVMS is now supported.
3447
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003448- AtheOS is now supported.
3449
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003450- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3451
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003452- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3453
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003454Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003455-----
3456
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003457- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3458 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3459 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003460
3461Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003462-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003463
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003464- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3465 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3466 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3467 bugs.
3468 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003469 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003470 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3471 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003472 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003473
3474- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003475 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003476
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003477- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3478 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3479
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003480- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3481 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003482 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003483 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3484
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003485- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3486 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3487 use files" uninstall option).
3488
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003489- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3490
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003491- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3492 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3493
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003494- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3495 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3496 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3497
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003498- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3499 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3500 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3501 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3502 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003503 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3504 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3505 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003506
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003507- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003508 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003509 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3510 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3511 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3512 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3513 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3514 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3515 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3516 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3517 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3518 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3519 work around.
3520
3521- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3522 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3523 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3524 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3525 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3526 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3527 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3528 specified with O_CREAT too).
3529
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003530Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003531----
3532
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003533- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003534
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003535- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3536 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3537 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3538
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003539- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3540 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3541 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3542
3543- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3544 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3545 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3546 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3547 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3548 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3549 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3550 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003551
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003552- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3553 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3554 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003555
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003556- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3557 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3558 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3559 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3560 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003561
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003562- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3563 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3564 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003565
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003566- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3567 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003568
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003569- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3570 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3571 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3572 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3573 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003574
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003575- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3576 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3577 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3578
3579- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3580 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3581 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003582
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003583- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3584 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3585 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3586 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003587 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003588
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003589- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3590 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003591
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003592- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3593 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003594
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003595- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003596 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003597 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3598 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003599
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003600
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003601What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003602===============================
3603
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003604*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3605
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003606Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003607--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003608
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003609- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3610 with a custom metaclass.
3611
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003612Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003613-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003614
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003615- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3616 are proxies.
3617
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003618Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003619-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003620
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003621- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3622 very short strings.
3623
3624- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3625 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3626 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3627 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3628 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3629
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003630Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003631-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003632
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003633- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3634 close or delete time).
3635
3636- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3637 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3638
3639- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3640
3641- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003642 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003643
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003644Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003645-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003646
3647Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003648-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003649
3650C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003651-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003652
3653New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003654-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003655
3656Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003657-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003658
3659Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003660-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003661
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003662- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3663
3664- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3665 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3666
3667- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3668 deleted at process exit time.
3669
3670- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3671 in backslash.
3672
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003673Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003674----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003675
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003676- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3677 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3678 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3679
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003680
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003681What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003682===========================
3683
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003684*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3685
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003686Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003687--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003688
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003689- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3690 been extensively updated. See
3691
3692 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3693
3694 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3695
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003696- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3697 deleted!
3698
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003699- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3700 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3701 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3702 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3703 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3704
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003705- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3706
3707 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3708 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3709
3710 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3711 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3712 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3713 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3714 supported anyway.
3715
3716 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3717 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3718
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003719- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3720 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3721 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3722 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3723 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003724
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003725- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3726 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3727 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3728
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003729Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003730-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003731
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003732- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3733 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3734 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3735 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3736 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3737 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003738 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3739 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3740 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3741 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003742
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003743- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3744 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3745 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3746
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003747Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003748-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003749
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003750- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3751
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003752Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003753-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003754
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003755- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3756 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3757 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3758 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3759 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3760 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3761
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003762- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3763
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003764- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3765
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003766- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3767
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003768- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3769 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3770 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3771
3772- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3773
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003774Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003775-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003776
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003777- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3778 off a search on Google.
3779
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003780Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003781-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003782
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003783- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3784 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3785 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3786 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3787 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3788 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3789 other platforms should do likewise.
3790
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003791- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3792 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3793 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3794
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003795C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003796-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003797
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003798- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3799 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3800 producing key-value pairs.
3801
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003802- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003803 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003804 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3805 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3806 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3807 previously went unchallenged.
3808
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003809New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003810-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003811
3812Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003813-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003814
3815Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003816-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003817
3818Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003819----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003820
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003821- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3822 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003823
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003824- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3825 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3826 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3827 home.
3828
3829
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003830What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003831===========================
3832
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003833*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3834
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003835Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003836--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003837
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003838- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3839 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003840
3841 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003842 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003843
3844 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3845 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003846 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003847 This needs to be documented.
3848
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003849- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3850 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3851
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003852- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3853 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3854 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3855
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003856- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3857 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3858
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003859- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3860 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3861 class forbids it).
3862
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003863- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3864 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3865 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3866
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003867- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3868
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003869Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003870-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003871
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003872- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3873 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003874 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003875
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003876- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3877 (like 1 + '').
3878
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003879Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003880-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003881
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003882- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3883 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3884 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3885 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003886 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003887 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3888
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003889- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3890 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3891 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3892 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3893
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003894- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3895 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003896 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3897 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3898 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003899
3900- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3901 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003902
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003903- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3904 bytes on its input.
3905
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003906Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003907-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003908
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003909- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003910 convenience function.
3911
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003912- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3913 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3914 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003915 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3916 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3917 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3918 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3919 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3920 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003921
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003922- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3923 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3924 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3925 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3926
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003927- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3928 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3929 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3930
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003931- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3932 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3933 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3934 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3935
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003936- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3937 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003938 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003939 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3940 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3941 new -l and -e options.
3942
3943- statcache is now deprecated.
3944
3945- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3946 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003947 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003948 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3949 time properly taken into account.
3950
3951- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3952 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3953 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3954 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3955
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003956Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003957-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003958
3959Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003960-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003961
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003962- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3963 is built with libdb3 if available.
3964
3965- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3966
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003967C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003968-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003969
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003970- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3971 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3972 PySequence_Size().
3973
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003974- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3975
3976- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3977 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3978 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3979
3980- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3981 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3982
3983- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3984 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3985
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003986New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003987-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003988
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003989- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3990 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3991
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003992- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3993 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3994
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003995- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3996
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003997Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003998-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003999
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004000- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4001 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4002
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004003Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004004-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004005
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004006Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004007----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004008
4009- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4010 removed completely in the next release.
4011
4012- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4013 OSX.
4014
4015- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4016 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4017
4018- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4019
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004020
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004021What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004022===========================
4023
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004024*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4025
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004026Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004027--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004028
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004029- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004030 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004031 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004032 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4033 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004034 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4035 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004036 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4037 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004038
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004039- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4040 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4041
4042- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4043 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4044
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004045Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004046-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004047
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004048- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4049 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4050 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4051 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4052 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4053 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4054 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4055 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4056
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004057- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4058 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4059 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4060 example).
4061
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004062- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004063 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004064 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004065 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004066
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004067- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4068 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4069 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004070 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004071
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004072- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4073 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4074 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4075 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4076 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4077 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4078
4079 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4080
4081 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4082
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004083Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004084-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004085
4086- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4087
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004088- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4089
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004090- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4091 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004092
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004093- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4094 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4095 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4096 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4097 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4098 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004099 attributes.
4100
4101- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4102 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4103 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004104
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004105- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4106 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4107 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004108
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004109- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4110 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4111 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004112 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4113 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4114
4115- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4116 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004117
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004118Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004119-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004120
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004121- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4122 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4123
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004124- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4125 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4126 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4127 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4128
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004129- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4130 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4131 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4132 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4133
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004134 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4135 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4136 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4137 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4138 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4139 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4140 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4141 without losing information).
4142
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004143- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004144 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4145 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4146 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4147 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4148 module).
4149
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004150 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004151 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4152 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4153 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4154 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004155
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004156- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004157 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4158 encoding.
4159
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004160- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4161 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4162
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004163- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004164 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4165
4166- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4167 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4168 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4169 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4170
4171- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4172
4173- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4174 ON, and OFF.
4175
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004176- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4177 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4178
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004179Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004180-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004181
4182- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4183 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4184 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004185
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004186- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4187 been added: -X and -E.
4188
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004189Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004190-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004191
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004192- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4193 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4194
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004195C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004196-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004197
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004198- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4199 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4200 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4201 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4202 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4203
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004204- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4205 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4206 as long) arguments.
4207
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004208- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4209 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4210 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4211 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4212 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4213 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4214
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004215- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4216 input.
4217
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004218New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004219-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004220
4221Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004222-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004223
4224Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004225-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004226
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004227- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4228 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4229 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4230
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004231- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4232 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4233 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004234 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004235
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004236 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4237 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4238 import signal
4239 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004240
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004241 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004242 while 1:
4243 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004244 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004245 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4246 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4247 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4248 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004249
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004250
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004251What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4252===========================
4253
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004254*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4255
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004256Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004257--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004258
4259- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4260 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4261 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4262
4263- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4264 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4265 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4266 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4267 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4268 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4269 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004270
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004271- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004272 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004273 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4274 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4275 associate a docstring with a property.
4276
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004277- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4278 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4279 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4280 other built-in object types.
4281
4282- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4283 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4284 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4285 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4286 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4287
4288- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4289 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4290
4291- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4292 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004293 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004294 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4295 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4296 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4297 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4298 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4299
4300- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4301 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4302 class.
4303
4304- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4305 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4306 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4307 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4308
4309- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4310 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4311 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4312 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4313
4314- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4315 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4316
4317- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4318 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4319 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4320 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4321 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004322 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004323 with the same value as s.
4324
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004325- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4326
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004327Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004328----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004329
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004330- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4331
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004332- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4333 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4334 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4335 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4336 objects.
4337
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004338- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4339 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004340 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4341 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4342
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004343- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4344 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4345 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4346
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004347Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004348-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004349
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004350- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4351 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4352 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4353 by the instances.
4354
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004355- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4356 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4357 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4358
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004359- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4360 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4361 before the entire comparison is complete.
4362
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004363- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4364 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4365 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4366
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004367- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4368 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4369 getwriter().
4370
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004371- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4372 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4373
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004374- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004375 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4376 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4377
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004378- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4379 iterable object.
4380
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004381- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4382 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004383
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004384- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4385 authentication.
4386
4387- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4388 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004389
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004390- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004391 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4392 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4393 a sample driver.)
4394
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004395Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004396-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004397
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004398- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4399 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4400 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4401 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4402 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4403 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4404 kernel has large file support.
4405
4406- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4407 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4408 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4409 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4410 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4411
4412- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4413 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4414 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4415
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004416C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004417-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004418
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004419- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4420 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4421
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004422New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004423-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004424
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004425- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4426 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4427
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004428Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004429-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004430
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004431- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4432 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4433 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4434 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4435 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4436
4437- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4438 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4439 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4440 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4441
4442- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4443 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4444
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004445Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004446-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004447
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004448- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004449 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4450 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004451
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004452
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004453What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4454===========================
4455
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004456*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4457
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004458Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004459----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004460
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004461- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4462 big to represent as a C double.
4463
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004464- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4465 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4466 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4467 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4468 restriction).
4469
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004470- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4471 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4472 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4473 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4474 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4475
4476 >>> dir([])
4477 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4478 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4479 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4480 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4481 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4482 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4483 'reverse', 'sort']
4484
4485 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4486
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004487- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004488 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4489 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4490 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4491 OverflowError exception.
4492
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004493- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004494 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004495 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4496 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4497 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4498 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4499 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004500 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004501 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4502 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4503
4504 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4505 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4506 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4507 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004508
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004509- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004510 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4511 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4512 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4513 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4514 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4515 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4516 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4517 once it is created.
4518
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004519- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4520 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4521 (key, value) pairs.
4522
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004523- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004524 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4525 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4526
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004527- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4528 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4529 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4530 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4531 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004532
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004533- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004534 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4535 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4536
4537 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4538
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004539- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004540 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4541
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004542Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004543-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004544
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004545- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004546 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4547 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004548
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004549- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4550 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4551 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4552 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4553 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4554 in this area anymore).
4555
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004556- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4557 threading.Timer.
4558
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004559- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4560 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4561
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004562- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004563 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4564
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004565- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004566 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4567 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4568 converted to Python longs.
4569
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004570- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004571 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4572
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004573- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4574 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4575 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4576
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004577Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004578-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004579
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004580- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4581 division operators as per PEP 238.
4582
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004583Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004584-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004585
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004586- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4587 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4588 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4589 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4590
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004591C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004592-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004593
4594- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004595
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004596- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4597 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004598 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004599
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004600 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4601 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004602 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004603 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004604
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004605- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004606 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4607 module:
4608
4609 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004610
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004611 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4612 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004613
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004614 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4615 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004616
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004617 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4618
4619 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4620
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004621- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004622 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4623 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4624 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004625
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004626New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004627-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004628
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004629- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4630 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4631 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4632 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4633 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004634
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004635Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004636-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004637
4638Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004639-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004640
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004641- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4642 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4643 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4644 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004645 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4646 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4647 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4648 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4649 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004650
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004651- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004652 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4653
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004654
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004655What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4656===========================
4657
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004658*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4659
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004660Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004661-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004662
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004663- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4664 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4665
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004666- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4667 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4668 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004669
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004670- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4671 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4672 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4673 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004674
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004675- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4676
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004677- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004678
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004679Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004680-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004681
4682- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004683 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004684 the module docstring for details.
4685
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004686Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004687-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004688
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004689- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004690 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4691 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4692 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004693
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004694- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4695 Nick Mathewson.
4696
4697Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004698----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004699
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004700- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4701 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4702 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4703 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4704 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4705 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4706 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4707 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4708
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004709- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4710 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4711 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4712 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4713
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004714- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4715 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4716 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4717 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4718 come a long way).
4719
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004720- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4721 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4722 write filters for these warnings).
4723
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004724- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4725 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4726 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4727 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4728 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4729
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004730- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4731 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4732 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4733 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4734 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4735 older distribution.
4736
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004737Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004738-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004739
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004740- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4741 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004742 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004743
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004744- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4745 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4746 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4747
4748- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4749
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004750- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4751
4752- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4753
4754- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4755
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004756- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004757
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004758- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4759
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004760New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004761-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004762
4763C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004764-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004765
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004766- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4767 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4768 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4769 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4770 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4771 against buffer overruns.
4772
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004773- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004774 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4775 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004776 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4777 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4778 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4779
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004780- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4781 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4782 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4783 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4784 deprecated.
4785
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004786Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004787-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004788
4789- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4790 relevant is found.
4791
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004792
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004793What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004794===========================
4795
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004796*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4797
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004798Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004799----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004800
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004801- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4802 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4803 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4804 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4805 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4806 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4807 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4808 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004809 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004810 repaired.
4811
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004812- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004813 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004814 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4815 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4816 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4817 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4818 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4819 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4820 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4821 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4822
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004823- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4824 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4825 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4826 leading BMO character).
4827
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004828- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4829 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4830 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4831
4832 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4833 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4834 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004835
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004836 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4837 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4838 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4839 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4840 for various simple to use conversions.
4841
4842 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4843 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4844
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004845 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4846 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4847 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4848 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4849 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4850 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4851 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4852 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4853 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4854 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4855 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4856 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4857 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4858 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4859 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004860
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004861- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4862 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4863 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004864 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004865 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004866
4867 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004868 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4869 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4870 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4871 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4872 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004873 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4874 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004875
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004876 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4877 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4878 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004879 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004880
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004881- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4882 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4883 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4884 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4885 floating arithmetic,
4886
4887 x = 9007199254740992.0
4888 print long(x)
4889
4890 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4891 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4892 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4893 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4894 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4895 functions are of good quality).
4896
4897 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4898 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4899 algorithms to break.
4900
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004901- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4902 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4903 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4904 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4905 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4906 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4907 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4908 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4909 order.
4910
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004911- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4912 operation along the most common code paths.
4913
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004914- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4915 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4916
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004917- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4918 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4919 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4920 {}.update(UserDict())
4921
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004922- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4923 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4924 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4925 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4926 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4927 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4928 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4929 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4930
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004931- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004932 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004933
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004934 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004935 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4936 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004937 join() method of strings
4938 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004939 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4940 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004941 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004942 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004943
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004944- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4945 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4946
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004947- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4948 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4949
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004950- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4951 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4952 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4953 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4954
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004955- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4956 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004957 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004958 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4959 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004960
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004961- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4962
4963
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004964Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004965-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004966
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004967- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004968 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004969 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4970 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4971
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004972- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4973 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4974
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004975- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4976 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4977 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4978 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4979
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004980- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4981 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4982 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4983
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004984- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4985
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004986- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4987
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004988- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4989 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4990 that are still imported into string.py).
4991
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004992- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4993
4994- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4995 Now it does.
4996
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004997- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4998
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004999- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5000 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5001 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5002 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5003 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005004 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5005 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005006
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005007- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5008 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5009 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5010 'help(object)'.
5011
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005012Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005013-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005014
5015- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005016 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005017 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5018 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5019
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005020- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005021 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5022 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005023
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005024C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005025-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005026
5027- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5028 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005029
5030----
5031
5032**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**