blob: e457fa19ff182827dbee45dcdc2b016b42d949a2 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000015- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
16
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000017- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
18 reference counts in some error exit cases.
19
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000020- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
21 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
22 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
23 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
24 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
25 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
26 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
27 realloc.
28
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000029- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
30 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
31
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000032- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
33 like their int counterparts.
34
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000035- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
36 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
37 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
38 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
39 for a longer write-up of the problem).
40
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000041- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
42 serializing floats.
43
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000044- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
45 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
46 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
47
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000048- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
49 278.
50
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000051- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
52 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
53 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
54 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
55 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
56 PyNumber_*().
57 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
58
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000059- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
60 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
61 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
62 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
63
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000064- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
65 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
66 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
67 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
68 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
69
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000070- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
71 disabled caused a crash.
72
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000073- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
74 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
75
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000076- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000077 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
78
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000079- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
80
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000081- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000082 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
83 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
84 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000085
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000086- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
87
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000088- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
89 returning None.
90
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000091- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000092 ('\') with a specific error message.
93
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000094- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
95
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000096- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
97 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
98
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000099- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000100 an ferror() call.
101
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000102- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
103 list.sort().
104
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000105- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
106 (2+3) --> (5).
107
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000108- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
109
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000110- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
111 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000112
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000113- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
114 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
115 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
116
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000117Extension Modules
118-----------------
119
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000120- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000121 implemented treated all integer values except 1 as false.
122
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000123- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
124
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000125- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
126 if available on the platform.
127
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000128- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
129 available on the platform.
130
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000131- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
132 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
133
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000134- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
135
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000136- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
137 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
138 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
139
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000140- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
141
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000142- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
143 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
144
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000145- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000146 file size.
147
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000148- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
149
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000150- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
151 {remove_history,replace_history}
152
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000153- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
154 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000155
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000156- stat_float_times is now True.
157
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000158- array.array objects are now picklable.
159
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000160- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
161 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
162
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000163- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
164 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
165 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
166
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000167- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
168 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000169
170Library
171-------
172
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000173- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
174 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
175
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000176- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
177 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
178
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000179- textwrap now processes text chucks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
180 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
181
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000182- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
183 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
184
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000185- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
186 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
187
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000188- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
189 though this can be missing in embedded interpreters
190
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000191- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
192
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000193- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
194 error messages.
195
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000196- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
197
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000198- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
199 Bug #1224621.
200
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000201- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
202 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
203 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
204 terminates by raising StopIteration.
205
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000206- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
207
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000208- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
209 component of the path.
210
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000211- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
212 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
213 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
214 class at all.
215
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000216- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
217 files to PyPI.
218
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000219- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
220 them to PyPI.
221
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000222- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
223 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
224 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
225 work as expected.
226
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000227- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
228 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
229
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000230- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000231 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
232
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000233- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
234
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000235- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
236 to build.
237
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000238- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
239 symbolic links on Windows.
240
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000241- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000242 profile.py if available.
243
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000244- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
245
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000246- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
247 in LWPCookieJar.
248
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000249- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
250
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000251- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
252
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000253- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
254
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000255- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
256
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000257- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
258
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000259- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
260
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000261- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
262
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000263- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
264
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000265- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
266 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
267 be exploited in various ways.
268
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000269- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
270
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000271- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
272
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000273- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
274
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000275- Enhancements to the csv module:
276
277 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000278 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000279 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000280 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
281 reporting.
282 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
283 dictates.
284 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000285 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000286 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000287 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
288 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000289 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
290 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000291 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000292 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
293 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
294 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
295 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
296 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
297 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
298 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
299 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
300 without first creating a dialect class.
301 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
302 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
303 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000304 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000305 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
306 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000307 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
308 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
309 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
310 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000311 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
312 This has been fixed.
313
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000314- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
315 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
316 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
317 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
318
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000319- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
320
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000321- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
322 (Bug #951915).
323
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000324- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
325 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
326 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
327 encoding alias table
328
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000329- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
330
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000331- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
332 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
333
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000334- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
335
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000336- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
337
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000338- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
339
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000340- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
341
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000342- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
343
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000344- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
345 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
346 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
347
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000348- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000349 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000350
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000351- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
352 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
353 tokenizer with very long source lines.
354
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000355- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
356 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
357
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000358- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
359 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000360
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000361- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
362 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
363
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000364- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
365 correctly.
366
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000367- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
368 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
369 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
370 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
371 between two lines.
372
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000373
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000374Build
375-----
376
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000377- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
378 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
379
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000380- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
381 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
382 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000383 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000384
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000385- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
386 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
387 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
388
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000389- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
390
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000391- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
392 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
393
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000394- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
395 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
396 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
397 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
398 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
399 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
400 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
401 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
402
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000403- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
404 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
405 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
406 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
407
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000408
409C API
410-----
411
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000412- Removed PyRange_New().
413
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000414
415Tests
416-----
417
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000418- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000419
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000420
421Documentation
422-------------
423
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000424- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
425
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000426- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
427
428- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
429
430- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
431
432- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
433
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000434- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
435 Closes bug #1166582.
436
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000437- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
438 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
439 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
440
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000441Mac
442---
443
444
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000445New platforms
446-------------
447
448- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
449
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000450
451Tools/Demos
452-----------
453
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000454- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
455
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000456- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000457
458
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000459What's New in Python 2.4 final?
460===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000461
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000462*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000463
464Core and builtins
465-----------------
466
467- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
468 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
469 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
470
471
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000472What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
473==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000474
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000475*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000476
477Core and builtins
478-----------------
479
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000480- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
481 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
482 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
483
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000484
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000485Library
486-------
487
488- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
489 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
490 raised is re-raised.
491
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000492- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
493 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
494
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000495- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
496 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
497 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
498 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
499 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
500 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
501 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
502 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
503 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
504 by the slice are recomputed now.
505
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000506- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000507
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000508Build
509-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000510
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000511- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
512 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
513 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000514
515C API
516-----
517
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000518- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
519
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000520
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000521What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
522================================
523
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000524*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000525
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000526License
527-------
528
529The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
530is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
531changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
532Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
533intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
534durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
535the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
536License::
537
538 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
539
540says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
541to Python 2.1.1.
542
543The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
544License Version 2.
545
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000546Core and builtins
547-----------------
548
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000549- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
550 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
551 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
552 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
553 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
554 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
555 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
556 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
557 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
558 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
559
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000560- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000561
562Extension Modules
563-----------------
564
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000565- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
566 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
567 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
568 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000569
570Library
571-------
572
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000573- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
574 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
575 returned.
576
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000577- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
578
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000579- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
580 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
581
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000582- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
583
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000584- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
585 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000586
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000587- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
588
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000589- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
590
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000591- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000592 the source code is updated and reloaded.
593
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000594Build
595-----
596
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000597- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000598
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000599What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
600================================
601
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000602*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000603
604Core and builtins
605-----------------
606
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000607- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000608 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
609
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000610- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
611 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
612 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
613 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
614
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000615- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
616 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
617
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000618- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
619 constant.
620
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000621- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
622 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
623 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
624 large), and to anomalies such as
625 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
626 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
627 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
628 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000629
630Extension modules
631-----------------
632
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000633- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
634 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000635 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
636 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
637 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000638
639Library
640-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000641
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000642- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000643 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000644 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
645 --swig-cpp.
646
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000647- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
648 it is set.
649
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000650- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000651
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000652- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
653 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
654 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
655 Closes bug #1039270.
656
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000657- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000658
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000659 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000660 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
661 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
662 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
663 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
664 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
665 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
666 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
667 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
668 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
669 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
670 + Updates to documentation.
671
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000672- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
673 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
674 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
675 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
676
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000677- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000678
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000679- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
680 applications should use the getmember function.
681
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000682- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
683
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000684- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
685 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
686 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
687 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
688 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
689 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
690 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
691 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
692 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
693
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000694- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
695 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000696 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000697
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000698- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
699 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
700 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
701 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
702 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
703 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
704 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
705 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000706
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000707- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
708 the new public features (of which there are many).
709
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000710- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000711 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
712 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
713 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
714 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000715 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000716
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000717- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
718
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000719- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
720 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
721 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
722 options.
723
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000724- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
725 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
726 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
727 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
728 conditions under which non-string values work.
729
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000730Build
731-----
732
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000733- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
734 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
735 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
736
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000737- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
738 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
739 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
740 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
741 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000742
743C API
744-----
745
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000746- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
747 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
748
749- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
750
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000751- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
752 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
753 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
754 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
755 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
756 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
757 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
758 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
759 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
760
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000761- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
762
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000763- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
764 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
765 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000766
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000767Tests
768-----
769
770- test__locale ported to unittest
771
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000772Mac
773---
774
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000775- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
776 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
777 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000778
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000779Tools/Demos
780-----------
781
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000782- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
783 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
784 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
785 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
786 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000787
788
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000789What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
790=================================
791
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000792*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000793
794Core and builtins
795-----------------
796
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000797- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000798 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
799
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000800- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
801 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
802 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
803 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
804 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
805 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
806 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
807 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000808 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
809 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
810 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
811 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
812 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000813
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000814- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
815 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
816 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
817 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
818 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
819
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000820- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
821
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000822- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
823 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
824
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000825- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
826 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
827 modified the list.
828
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000829- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
830 functions is now writable.
831
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000832- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
833 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
834 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
835 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
836
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000837- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
838 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
839 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
840 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
841 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000842
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000843- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
844 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
845
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000846Extension modules
847-----------------
848
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000849- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
850
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000851- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
852 data.
853
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000854- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
855 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
856 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
857 supposed to have been truncated away.
858
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000859- Added socket.socketpair().
860
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000861- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
862 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
863
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000864- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000865 versions of Python, have now been removed.
866
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000867Library
868-------
869
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000870- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000871 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000872
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000873- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
874 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
875
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000876- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
877 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
878
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000879- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
880
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000881- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
882 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000883
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000884- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
885 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
886
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000887- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
888
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000889- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
890
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000891- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
892
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000893- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
894 Percivall.
895
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000896- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
897 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
898
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000899- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
900 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
901 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000902 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000903
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000904- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
905 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
906 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
907 and exponent.
908
909- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
910
911- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +0000912 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000913 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
914
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000915- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
916 to the readline module.
917
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000918- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000919 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
920 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000921
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000922- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
923 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
924 contains symlinks.
925
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000926- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
927 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
928
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000929- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
930 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
931 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
932
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000933- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
934 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
935 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
936 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
937 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
938 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
939 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
940 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
941 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
942 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
943 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
944 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
945 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
946
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000947- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
948
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000949Tools/Demos
950-----------
951
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000952- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
953 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
954
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000955- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
956
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000957Build
958-----
959
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000960- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
961 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
962 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
963 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
964 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
965 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
966 plans to do so.
967
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000968- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
969 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
970
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000971- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
972 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
973
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000974- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
975 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
976
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000977- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
978 GNU/k*BSD systems.
979
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000980- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
981 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
982
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000983C API
984-----
985
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000986..
987
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000988Documentation
989-------------
990
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000991- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
992 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
993
994- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
995 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
996 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000997
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000998New platforms
999-------------
1000
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001001- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1002
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001003Tests
1004-----
1005
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001006..
1007
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001008Windows
1009-------
1010
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001011- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1012 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1013 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1014 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1015 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1016 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1017 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1018 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1019 the problem.
1020
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001021Mac
1022---
1023
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001024..
1025
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001026
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001027What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1028=================================
1029
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001030*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001031
1032Core and builtins
1033-----------------
1034
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001035- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1036 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1037 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1038 sensitive code.
1039
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001040- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001041 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001042
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001043 @staticmethod
1044 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001045
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001046 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001047
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001048- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1049 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1050 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1051 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1052 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1053 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1054 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1055 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1056 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1057 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1058 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1059
1060 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1061 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1062 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1063 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1064 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1065 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1066 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1067
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001068- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1069 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1070
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001071- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001072 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001073
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001074- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001075 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001076 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1077
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001078- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001079 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1080 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1081
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001082- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1083 types that support garbage collection.
1084
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001085- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1086
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001087- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1088 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1089 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1090 Jython.
1091
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001092- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1093
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001094- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1095 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1096
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001097- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1098 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1099 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001100
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001101- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1102 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1103 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1104
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001105Extension modules
1106-----------------
1107
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001108- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1109
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001110Library
1111-------
1112
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001113- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1114 TIS-620
1115
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001116- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1117 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1118 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1119 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1120 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1121 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1122 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1123 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1124 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1125 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1126
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001127- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1128
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001129- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1130 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1131 same as when the argument is omitted).
1132 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1133
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001134- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1135
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001136- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1137 schemes are offered.
1138
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001139- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1140
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001141- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1142 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1143 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1144
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001145- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1146
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001147- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1148 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1149
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001150- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1151 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1152 when dummy_threading is being used.
1153
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001154- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1155 from a tarfile.
1156
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001157- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001158 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001159
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001160- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1161 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1162 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1163 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1164
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001165- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1166 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1167
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001168- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1169 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1170 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1171 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1172 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1173 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1174 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1175 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1176 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1177 by some other method in progress).
1178
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001179- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1180 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1181 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001182
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001183- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1184
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001185- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1186 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1187 AM Kuchling.
1188
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001189- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1190 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1191 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1192
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001193- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1194 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1195 instead of unsigned.
1196
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001197- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001198 no longer part of the public API.
1199
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001200- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1201 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1202 string methods of the same name).
1203
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001204- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001205 SF patch 945642.
1206
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001207- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1208
1209 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1210
1211 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1212 DocTestSuites.
1213
1214- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1215 that provide thread-local data.
1216
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001217- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1218 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1219
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001220- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1221
1222- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1223 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1224 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1225
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001226- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1227
1228 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1229 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1230 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001231
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001232 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1233 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1234 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1235 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1236
1237 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1238 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1239
1240 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1241 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1242 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1243 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1244
1245 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1246 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1247 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1248 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1249 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1250
1251 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1252 wrapping help output.
1253
1254 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1255 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1256 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001257
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001258C API
1259-----
1260
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001261- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1262 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1263 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1264 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1265 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1266 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1267 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1268 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1269 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1270 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1271 its visible semantics have not changed.
1272
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001273- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1274 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1275
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001276Documentation
1277-------------
1278
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001279- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001280
1281 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001282 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001283
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001284 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001285
1286 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1287
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001288- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001289
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001290Tests
1291-----
1292
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001293- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001294 platforms that use the Makefile.
1295
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001296- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1297 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1298 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1299
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001300
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001301What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1302=================================
1303
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001304*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001305
1306Core and builtins
1307-----------------
1308
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001309- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1310 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1311 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1312 objects now (one object instead of three).
1313
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001314- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1315 Windows DLLs.
1316
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001317- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1318 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001319
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001320- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1321 a new .pyc magic.
1322
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001323- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1324 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1325 be there.
1326
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001327- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1328 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1329 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1330
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001331- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1332 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1333 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1334
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001335- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1336
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001337- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1338 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1339 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001340
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001341- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1342 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1343
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001344- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1345
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001346- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001347 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001348
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001349- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1350
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001351- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1352
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001353- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1354 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1355
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001356- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1357 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1358 Fixes bug #858016 .
1359
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001360- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1361 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1362 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1363
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001364- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1365 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1366 improves their performance (about 35%).
1367
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001368- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1369 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1370 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1371
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001372- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1373 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1374 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1375 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1376
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001377- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1378 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001379 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001380 length is not known).
1381
1382- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1383 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001384 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1385 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001386 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1387
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001388- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1389 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1390
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001391- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1392 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1393 keyword arguments.
1394
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001395- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1396 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1397 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1398
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001399- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1400 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1401 cases.
1402
1403- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1404 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1405 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1406 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1407 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1408 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1409 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1410 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1411 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1412 a release build.
1413
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001414- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1415 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1416
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001417- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001418 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001419
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001420- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1421 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1422 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1423 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1424 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1425 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1426 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1427 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1428 destroyed.
1429
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001430- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1431 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1432 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1433 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1434 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1435 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1436 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1437 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1438
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001439- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1440 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1441 character other than a space.
1442
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001443- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1444 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1445 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1446 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1447 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1448 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1449 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1450 attributes with the same name.
1451
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001452- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1453 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1454 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1455 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1456 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1457 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1458 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1459 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1460 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1461 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1462 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1463 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1464 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1465 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001466
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001467- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1468 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1469 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1470 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1471 This has been repaired.
1472
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001473- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1474
1475- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1476
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001477- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1478 over a sequence.
1479
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001480- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001481 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001482
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001483- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1484
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001485- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1486 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1487 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1488 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1489 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1490 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1491 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1492 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1493
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001494- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1495 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1496 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1497
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001498- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1499 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1500 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1501 freelist.
1502
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001503- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1504 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1505
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001506- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1507 number.
1508
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001509- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1510 a TypeError exception.
1511
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001512- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1513 820195.
1514
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001515- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1516 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1517 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1518
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001519- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001520 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1521 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001522
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001523- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1524 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1525 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1526
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001527- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1528 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001529 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001530
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001531- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001532 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1533 the first call.
1534
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001535
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001536Extension modules
1537-----------------
1538
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001539- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1540 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1541
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001542- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1543 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1544 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1545 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1546 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1547 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1548 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001549
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001550- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1551
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001552- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1553
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001554- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1555 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1556
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001557- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1558 fewer false positives.
1559
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001560- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1561 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1562
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001563- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001564 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1565
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001566- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001567 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001568 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001569 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1570 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001571
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001572- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1573 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1574 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1575 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1576
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001577- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1578 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1579 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1580 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1581 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1582 #897625.
1583
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001584- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1585 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1586
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001587- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1588 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1589 and pops on either side of the deque.
1590
1591- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1592 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1593
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001594- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1595 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1596 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1597 other functions that expect a function argument.
1598
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001599- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1600
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001601- os.getsid was added.
1602
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001603- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1604 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1605 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1606
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001607- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1608
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001609- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1610
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001611- readline.clear_history was added.
1612
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001613- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1614
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001615- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1616
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001617- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1618
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001619- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1620
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001621- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1622
1623- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1624
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001625- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1626
1627- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1628
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001629- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1630 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1631 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1632
1633- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1634 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1635 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1636 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1637 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1638 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1639 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1640
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001641- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1642 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1643 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1644 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001645
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001646- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001647 iterators from a single iterable.
1648
1649- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1650 of raising a TypeError exception.
1651
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001652- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1653 as parameter.
1654
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001655Library
1656-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001657
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001658- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1659 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1660 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001661
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001662- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1663 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1664 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001665
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001666- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001667
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001668- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1669 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001670
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001671- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1672 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1673
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001674- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1675
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001676- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001677 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001678
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001679- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001680 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001681
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001682- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1683
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001684- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1685 on cygwin and mingw32.
1686
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001687- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1688
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001689- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1690 module.
1691
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001692- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1693 installation scheme for all platforms.
1694
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001695- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001696 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001697
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001698- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1699 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1700 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1701
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001702- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1703 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1704 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1705
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001706- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1707
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001708- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1709
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001710- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1711 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1712
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001713- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1714 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1715 type pattern with the same value exists.
1716
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001717- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1718 when run from the command prompt).
1719
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001720- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1721 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1722
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001723- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1724 default sort).
1725
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001726- Added global runctx function to profile module
1727
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001728- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1729
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001730- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1731
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001732- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1733
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001734- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001735 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1736 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1737 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1738 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1739 accordingly.
1740
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001741- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1742 decoding standards.
1743
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001744- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1745 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1746 called for all requests.
1747
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001748- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1749 they are passed to the compiler.
1750
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001751- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1752 indent, width and depth.
1753
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001754- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1755 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1756
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001757- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1758 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1759
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001760- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1761
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001762- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1763
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001764- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1765
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001766- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1767 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1768
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001769- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001770 for better performance.
1771
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001772- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001773
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001774- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1775 a string).
1776
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001777- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1778
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001779- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1780
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001781- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1782
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001783- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1784
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001785- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1786 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1787 list of fieldnames.
1788
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001789- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1790 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1791
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001792- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1793
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001794- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1795 empty lists.
1796
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001797- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1798 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1799 and shelves.
1800
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001801- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1802 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1803
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001804- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001805 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1806 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001807
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001808- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1809 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001810 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001811
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001812- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001813 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1814 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1815
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001816- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1817 and removed in Py2.4.
1818
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001819- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1820
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001821- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1822
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001823Tools/Demos
1824-----------
1825
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001826- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1827 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1828
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001829- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1830
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001831- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1832 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1833 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1834 destination in situations where both files are given.
1835
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001836- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1837 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1838 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1839 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1840
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001841- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1842
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001843- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1844 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1845 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1846 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1847 now.
1848
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001849- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1850 in effect
1851
1852- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1853 C-c C-h
1854
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001855- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1856 -d option was given.
1857
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001858Build
1859-----
1860
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001861- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1862 build under OS X.
1863
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001864- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1865 --enable-profiling.
1866
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001867- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1868 is configured --with-tsc.
1869
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001870- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1871 on AMD64.
1872
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001873- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1874 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1875
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001876- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1877 removed.
1878
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001879- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1880 supported (see PEP 11).
1881
1882- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1883
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001884- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1885
1886- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1887 (see PEP 11).
1888
1889- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1890 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1891
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001892C API
1893-----
1894
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001895- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1896 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1897 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1898
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001899- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1900 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1901 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1902 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1903
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001904- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1905 generator objects.
1906
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001907- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1908 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001909 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1910 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001911
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001912- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1913 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1914
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001915- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1916 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1917 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1918 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1919 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1920
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001921- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1922 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1923 about 10% faster.
1924
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001925- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1926 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1927
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001928- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1929 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1930 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1931 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1932
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001933Windows
1934-------
1935
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001936- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1937 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1938 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1939 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1940
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001941- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1942 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1943 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1944
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001945
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001946What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1947===============================
1948
1949*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1950
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001951IDLE
1952----
1953
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001954- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1955 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1956 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1957 context-menu actions.
1958
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001959- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1960 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1961 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1962 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1963 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1964 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1965 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1966 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1967 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1968
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001969
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001970What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1971=============================================
1972
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001973*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001974
1975Core and builtins
1976-----------------
1977
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001978- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001979 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001980 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1981
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001982Extension modules
1983-----------------
1984
1985- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1986 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1987 than once. This has been fixed.
1988
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001989- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1990 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1991 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1992 call.
1993
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001994- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1995
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001996Library
1997-------
1998
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001999- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2000 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2001
2002- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2003 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2004 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2005 restored.
2006
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002007IDLE
2008----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002009
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002010- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002011
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002012Build
2013-----
2014
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002015- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2016 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2017
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002018C API
2019-----
2020
2021Windows
2022-------
2023
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002024- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2025 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2026
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002027- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2028
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002029Mac
2030---
2031
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002032- Various fixes to pimp.
2033
2034- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2035
2036- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2037 more problems than it solves.
2038
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002039
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002040What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2041=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002042
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002043*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2044
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002045Core and builtins
2046-----------------
2047
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002048- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2049 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2050
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002051- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2052 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002053 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002054
2055- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2056 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2057 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002058 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002059
2060- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2061 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002062
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002063- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2064 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2065 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2066
2067- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002068 770247.
2069
2070- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002071
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002072Extension modules
2073-----------------
2074
2075- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2076 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2077
2078- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2079
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002080- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2081
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002082- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2083 contained within the _strptime module.
2084
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002085- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2086 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2087
2088- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002089 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2090
2091- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2092 the find_class attribute, if present.
2093
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002094- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002095
2096 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2097 (SF bug 763298).
2098
2099 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002100 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2101 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2102 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002103
2104 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2105
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002106Library
2107-------
2108
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002109- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2110
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002111- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2112 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2113 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2114 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2115 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2116 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2117 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2118 or Tester().
2119
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002120- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2121 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2122 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2123 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2124 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2125 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2126 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2127 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2128 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002129
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002130 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002131
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002132- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2133 weren't before was an oversight.
2134
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002135- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2136 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2137
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002138- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2139 when there are no lines.
2140
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002141- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2142 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2143
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002144- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2145 to child processes.
2146
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002147- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2148
2149- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2150
2151- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2152 xmlrpclib.
2153
2154- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2155 responses.
2156
2157- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2158 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2159
2160- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2161 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2162 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2163
2164- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2165 used as patterns.
2166
2167- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2168 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2169 than Tk 8.3.
2170
2171- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2172
2173- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002174
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002175Tools/Demos
2176-----------
2177
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002178- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2179
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002180- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2181
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002182- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002183
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002184Build
2185-----
2186
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002187- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2188
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002189- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2190
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002191- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2192 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002193
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002194- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2195 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2196 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002197
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002198C API
2199-----
2200
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002201- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2202 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2203
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002204Windows
2205-------
2206
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002207- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2208 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2209 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2210 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2211 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2212 Python exception ::
2213
2214 thread.error: can't start new thread
2215
2216 is raised now.
2217
2218- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2219 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2220 instead of from DLL teardown.
2221
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002222Mac
2223---
2224
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002225- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002226 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002227 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2228 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2229 the executable in the bundle.
2230
2231- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002232
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002233- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2234
2235- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2236 on Panther.
2237
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002238What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2239================================
2240
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002241*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002242
2243Core and builtins
2244-----------------
2245
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002246- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2247 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2248 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2249 with the -i option.
2250
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002251- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2252 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2253
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002254- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2255 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2256
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002257- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2258 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2259 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2260 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2261 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2262 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2263 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2264 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2265 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2266 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2267 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2268 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2269 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002270
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002271- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2272 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2273 embedded in a lambda expression.
2274
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002275- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2276 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2277 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2278 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2279 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2280
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002281- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2282 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2283 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2284
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002285- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2286 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2287
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002288- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2289 It's writable again.
2290
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002291- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2292 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2293 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002294 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002295
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002296- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2297 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2298 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2299
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002300Extension modules
2301-----------------
2302
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002303- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2304 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2305
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002306- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2307 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2308 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2309 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2310
2311- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2312 collection.
2313
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002314- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2315 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2316 unique within a single program run.
2317
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002318- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2319 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2320
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002321- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2322 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2323
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002324- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2325 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002326
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002327- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2328
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002329- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2330 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2331
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002332- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2333 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2334 for many BSD-derived systems.
2335
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002336
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002337Library
2338-------
2339
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002340- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2341 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2342 primary ones:
2343
2344 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2345 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2346 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2347
2348 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2349 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2350 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2351 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2352 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2353 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2354
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002355- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2356 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2357 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2358 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2359 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2360 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2361 argument.
2362
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002363- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2364 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2365 in the archive.
2366
2367- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2368 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2369
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002370- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2371 569574).
2372
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002373- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2374 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2375 no more.
2376
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002377- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2378 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2379 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2380 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2381 code coverage.
2382
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002383- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2384 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2385 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002386 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2387 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002388
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002389- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2390 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2391 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002392 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002393
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002394- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2395
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002396- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2397 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2398 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2399 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2400
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002401- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2402 handling.
2403
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002404- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2405 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2406
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002407- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2408 in socket.py.
2409
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002410- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2411
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002412- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2413 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2414 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2415 opener with proxy support.
2416
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002417- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2418
2419- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2420
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002421Tools/Demos
2422-----------
2423
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002424- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2425
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002426- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2427
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002428- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2429 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002430
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002431- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2432 files.
2433
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002434Build
2435-----
2436
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002437- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002438 different root directory.
2439
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002440C API
2441-----
2442
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002443- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2444 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2445 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2446 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2447 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2448 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2449 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2450 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2451 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2452 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2453
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002454- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2455 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2456 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2457 from Python.
2458
2459
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002460New platforms
2461-------------
2462
2463None this time.
2464
2465Tests
2466-----
2467
2468- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2469 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2470
2471Windows
2472-------
2473
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002474- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2475
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002476- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2477 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2478 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2479 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2480 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2481 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2482 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2483 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2484 that's what it's for.
2485
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002486Mac
2487---
2488
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002489- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2490 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2491 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2492 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002493- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2494 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2495- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002496
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002497SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2498------------------------------------
2499
2500430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2501598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2502622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2503661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2504683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2505697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2506713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2507724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2508727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2509729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2510730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2511731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2512732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2513733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2514735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2515740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2516744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2517745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2518747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2519749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2520751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2521753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2522755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2523757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2524760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2525
2526
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002527What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2528================================
2529
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002530*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002531
2532Core and builtins
2533-----------------
2534
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002535- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2536 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2537
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002538- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2539 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2540 and cannot be strings).
2541
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002542- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2543 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2544 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2545 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2546
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002547- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2548 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2549 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2550 Python itself.
2551
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002552- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2553 the referenced object, if it has one.
2554
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002555- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2556 the thread started at
2557 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2558
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002559- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2560 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2561 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2562 placed on a list index.
2563
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002564- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2565 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2566 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2567 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2568
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002569- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2570 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2571 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2572 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2573 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2574 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2575 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2576
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002577- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2578 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2579 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2580 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2581 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2582
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002583- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2584 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002585
2586- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2587 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2588 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2589 #693195.)
2590
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002591- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2592 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002593
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002594- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002595 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002596 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2597 interpreter executions, would fail.
2598
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002599- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002600 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002601 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002602
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002603Extension modules
2604-----------------
2605
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002606- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2607 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2608 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2609 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2610
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002611- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2612 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2613
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002614- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2615 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2616 and Greg Chapman.)
2617
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002618- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2619 recursively.
2620
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002621- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002622 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2623 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2624 leaks.
2625
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002626- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2627
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002628- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2629 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2630 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2631 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2632 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2633 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2634 #705836.
2635
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002636- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002637 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2638
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002639- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2640 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2641 See SF bug #692416.
2642
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002643- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2644 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2645
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002646- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2647 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2648 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002649
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002650- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002651 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2652 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2653
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002654- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2655 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2656 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2657 timeouts to work properly.
2658
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002659Library
2660-------
2661
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002662- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2663 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2664 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2665 future release.
2666
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002667- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2668 for querying platform dependent features.
2669
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002670- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002671
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002672- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2673 pickle protocol versions.
2674
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002675- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2676 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2677 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2678
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002679- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2680
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002681- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2682 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2683 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2684 modules.
2685
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002686- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2687 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2688 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2689
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002690- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2691 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2692
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002693- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2694 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2695 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2696
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002697- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002698 MS Office extensions.
2699
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002700- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2701 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2702
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002703- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2704 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2705
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002706- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2707 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2708 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2709 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2710 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2711 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2712
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002713- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2714 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2715 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002716
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002717- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2718 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2719 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2720
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002721- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2722
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002723- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2724 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2725 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2726
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002727Tools/Demos
2728-----------
2729
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002730- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2731 See the module docstring for details.
2732
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002733Build
2734-----
2735
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002736- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2737 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002738
2739C API
2740-----
2741
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002742- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2743
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002744- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2745 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2746 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2747
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002748- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2749 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002750
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002751 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2752 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2753 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002754
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002755- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002756 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2757
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002758- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2759 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2760 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002761
2762New platforms
2763-------------
2764
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002765None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002766
2767Tests
2768-----
2769
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002770- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2771 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002772
2773Windows
2774-------
2775
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002776- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2777 function.
2778
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002779- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2780 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002781
2782Mac
2783---
2784
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002785- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2786 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002787
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002788- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2789 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002790
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002791- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2792 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2793 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002794
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002795- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002796 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2797 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002798
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002799- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2800 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002801
2802
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002803What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2804=================================
2805
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002806*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002807
2808Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002809-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002810
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002811- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2812 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2813 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2814
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002815- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2816 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2817 (SF patch #664376.)
2818
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002819- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2820 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2821 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2822 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2823 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2824 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002825 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002826
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002827- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2828 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2829 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2830 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002831 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002832
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002833- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2834 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2835 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2836 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2837 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2838 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2839 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2840 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2841 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2842 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2843 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2844
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002845- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2846 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2847 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2848 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2849 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2850 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2851
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002852- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2853 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2854
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002855- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2856 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2857 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2858 case.)
2859
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002860- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2861 passed as unicode strings.
2862
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002863- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2864 See SF bug #683467.
2865
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002866- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2867 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2868
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002869- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2870
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002871- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2872
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002873- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2874 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2875 arguments.
2876
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002877- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2878 See SF bug #667147.
2879
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002880- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002881 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002882 See SF bug #676155.
2883
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002884- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002885 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002886 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2887 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2888 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2889 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2890 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2891 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002892
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002893Extension modules
2894-----------------
2895
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002896- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2897 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2898 tp_as_number pointer.
2899
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002900- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2901 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2902 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2903 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2904 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2905
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002906- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2907
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002908- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2909
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002910- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002911 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002912 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2913 patch #678531.)
2914
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002915- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2916 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2917
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002918- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2919 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2920
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002921- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2922
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002923- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2924 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2925 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2926
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002927- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2928
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002929- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2930 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2931
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002932- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002933
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002934- datetime changes:
2935
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002936 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2937
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002938 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2939 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2940 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2941 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2942 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2943 now.
2944
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002945 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002946 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2947 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002948
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002949 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002950 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002951 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2952 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2953 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2954 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002955
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002956 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2957 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2958 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002959 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2960
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002961 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2962 by a later example coded by Guido.
2963
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002964 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002965 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2966 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2967 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002968 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2969 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2970
2971 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2972 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2973 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2974 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2975 tzinfo subclass instance.
2976
2977 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2978 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2979 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2980 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2981 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2982 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2983 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2984 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002985
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002986 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2987 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2988 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2989 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2990 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002991 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2992
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002993 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002994
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002995 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2996 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2997 as a naive datetime object.
2998
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002999 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3000 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3001 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3002
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003003 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3004 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3005 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3006 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3007 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3008 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3009 comparison.
3010
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003011 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3012 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3013 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3014 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003015 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003016
3017 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003018
3019 and ::
3020
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003021 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3022
3023 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3024 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3025 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3026 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3027
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003028 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3029 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3030 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3031 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3032 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3033
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003034 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3035 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003036 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3037 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003038
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003039Library
3040-------
3041
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003042- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3043 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3044
3045- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3046 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3047 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3048 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3049 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3050 See PEP 307 for details.
3051
3052- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3053 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3054
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003055- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3056 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003057 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003058 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3059 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003060 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003061
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003062- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3063 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3064
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003065- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3066 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3067 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3068
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003069- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3070
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003071- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3072 exception.
3073
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003074- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3075 class.
3076
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003077- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3078 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3079 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3080
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003081- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3082 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3083
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003084- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003085 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3086 See SF bug #659228.
3087
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003088- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3089 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3090 See SF patch #651082.
3091
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003092- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003093
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003094- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3095 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3096
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003097- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003098 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003099
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003100- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3101 DOS paths from other platforms.
3102
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003103Tools/Demos
3104-----------
3105
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003106- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3107 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3108 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3109 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3110 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3111 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3112 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3113 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3114 example:
3115
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003116 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3117 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003118
3119 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3120
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003121
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003122Build
3123-----
3124
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003125- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3126 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3127 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003128 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3129
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003130 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3131
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003132- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3133 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3134 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3135 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3136 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3137 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3138 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3139 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3140 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3141
3142- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3143 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3144 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3145 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3146
3147- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3148 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3149
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003150C API
3151-----
3152
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003153- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3154 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003155
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003156- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3157 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3158 tp_as_number pointer.
3159
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003160- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3161 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3162 (SF #681367)
3163
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003164- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3165 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3166 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3167 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003168
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003169Tests
3170-----
3171
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003172- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003173 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3174 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3175 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3176 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3177 pydoc.)
3178
3179- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3180
3181- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003182
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003183Windows
3184-------
3185
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003186- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3187 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3188 time).
3189
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003190- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3191 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3192
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003193- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3194 release without strong cryptography.
3195
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003196- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003197 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003198
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003199- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3200 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3201
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003202Mac
3203---
3204
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003205- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3206 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003207
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003208- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3209 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3210 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003211
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003212- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3213 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003214
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003215- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3216 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3217 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3218 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003219
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003220- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003221 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3222 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3223 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003224
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003225
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003226What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003227=================================
3228
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003229*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003230
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003231Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003232--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003233
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003234- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3235
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003236- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3237 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003238 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003239 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003240 a different meaning than before.
3241
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003242- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003243 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003244 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003245
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003246- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003247 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003248 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003249
3250- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3251 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3252 and deallocation.
3253
3254- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3255 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3256
3257- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3258 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3259 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3260 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3261 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3262
3263- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3264 now detected by the garbage collector.
3265
3266- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3267 [SF bug 519621]
3268
3269- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3270 identifier.
3271
3272- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3273 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3274 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3275 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3276 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3277 [SF bug 563060]
3278
3279- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3280 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3281 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3282 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3283 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3284
3285- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3286 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3287 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3288
3289- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3290
3291- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3292 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3293 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3294 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3295 state of the slots would be lost.)
3296
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003297Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003298-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003299
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003300- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003301 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3302 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3303 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3304 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003305 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3306 Jython 2.1.
3307
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003308- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003309 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003310 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3311 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3312 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3313 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3314 these, see PEP 302.
3315
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003316- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3317 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3318 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3319
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003320- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3321 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3322 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3323
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003324- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3325 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3326 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3327
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003328- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3329 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3330 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3331 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3332 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3333 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3334 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3335 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3336 releases or implementations.
3337
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003338- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003339 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3340 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003341
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003342- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3343 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3344
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003345- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3346 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3347 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3348
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003349- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3350 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3351
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003352- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3353 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003354 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3355 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003356
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003357- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3358 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3359 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3360 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3361 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3362
3363 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3364 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3365 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3366 pattern.
3367
3368 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3369 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3370 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3371 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3372
3373 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3374 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3375 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3376 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3377 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3378 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3379
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003380- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3381 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3382 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3383 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3384 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3385 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3386 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3387 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003388
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003389- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3390 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3391 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3392 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3393 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003394 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3395 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3396 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3397 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3398 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3399 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3400 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003401
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003402- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3403 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3404
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003405- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3406 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3407 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3408 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3409 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3410 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3411 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3412 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3413 to Zack Weinberg!
3414
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003415- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3416 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3417 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3418 type. This has been fixed now.
3419
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003420- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3421 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3422 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3423
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003424- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3425 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3426 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3427 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3428 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3429 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3430 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3431 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003432 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003433
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003434- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3435 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3436 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003437
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003438- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3439 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3440 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3441 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3442 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3443 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3444 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3445 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003446 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003447 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3448 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3449
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003450- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3451 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3452 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3453 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3454 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3455 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3456 this.)
3457
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003458- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3459 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003460 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003461 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003462 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3463 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003464 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3465 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003466
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003467- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3468 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3469 currently running.
3470
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003471- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3472 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3473 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3474 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3475
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003476- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3477 as directory names.
3478
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003479- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3480 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3481
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003482- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3483 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3484
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003485- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003486 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3487 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003488
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003489- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3490 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3491 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3492 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3493 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3494
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003495- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3496 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3497 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3498 removed.
3499
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003500- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3501 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3502 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3503
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003504- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3505 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3506 to __debug__.
3507
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003508- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3509 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3510 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3511
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003512- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3513 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3514 deprecated now.
3515
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003516- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3517 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3518 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003519
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003520- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3521 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3522 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3523 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3524 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003525
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003526- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3527 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3528
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003529- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3530 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3531 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003532 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003533 is backward compatible.
3534
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003535- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3536 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3537 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3538 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3539 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3540
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003541- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3542 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3543 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3544 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3545 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3546 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003547
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003548- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3549 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3550
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003551- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3552 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3553
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003554- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3555 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3556 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3557 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3558 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3559
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003560- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3561 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3562 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3563
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003564- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003565 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3566
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003567- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3568 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3569 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003570
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003571- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3572 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3573
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003574- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3575 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3576 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3577
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003578- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3579
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003580Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003581-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003582
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003583- Added three operators to the operator module:
3584 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3585 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3586 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3587
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003588- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3589
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003590- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3591 archives.
3592
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003593- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3594 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3595 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3596
3597 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3598
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003599- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3600 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3601 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003602 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003603
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003604- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3605 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3606 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3607 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003608 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3609 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3610 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3611 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003612
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003613- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3614 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003615
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003616- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3617
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003618- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3619 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3620
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003621- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3622 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3623 supported.
3624
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003625- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3626
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003627- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3628 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003629
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003630- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3631 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3632
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003633- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3634
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003635- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3636 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3637
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003638- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3639 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3640 functions but callable type objects.
3641
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003642- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003643 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003644 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003645
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003646- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3647 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003648
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003649- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3650 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003651
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003652- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3653 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3654 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3655 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3656
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003657- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3658 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003659
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003660- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3661 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3662 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3663 and __imul__.
3664
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003665- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003666 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3667 is called.
3668
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003669- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3670 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3671 interpreter was compiled.
3672
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003673- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3674 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3675 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003676 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003677 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3678 1, not 2.
3679
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003680- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3681 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3682 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3683 limit.
3684
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003685- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3686 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3687 bug #623464.
3688
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003689- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3690 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3691 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3692 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3693
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003694Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003695-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003696
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003697- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3698
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003699- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3700 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3701 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3702 with Python 2.3a2.
3703
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003704- os.path exposes getctime.
3705
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003706- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003707 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003708 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003709 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003710 unit tests of floating point results.
3711
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003712- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3713 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3714 has been increased.
3715
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003716- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3717 executed.
3718
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003719- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3720 postinstallation script.
3721
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003722- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3723 test the current module.
3724
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003725- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003726 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3727 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3728 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3729 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3730
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003731- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003732 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003733 Ward's Optik package.
3734
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003735- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3736 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3737 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3738 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3739
3740- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3741 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003742 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003743
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003744- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3745 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3746 shelf are binary pickles.
3747
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003748- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3749 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3750
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003751- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3752 modules are iterators now.
3753
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003754- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3755 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3756 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3757 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3758 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3759 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003760
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003761- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3762 with their entity value.
3763
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003764- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3765
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003766- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3767 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003768
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003769- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3770 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003771 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003772
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003773- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3774 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3775 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3776 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3777 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3778 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3779 main():
3780
3781 import locale
3782 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3783
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003784- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3785 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3786
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003787- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3788 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3789 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3790 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3791 to the new standard.
3792
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003793- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3794 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3795 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3796 an extension to the database.
3797
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003798- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3799 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3800 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3801 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003802 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003803
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003804- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003805 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003806
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003807- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3808 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3809 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3810 bounded integers.
3811
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003812- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3813 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3814 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3815 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3816 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3817 in existence.
3818
3819 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3820 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3821 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3822 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3823 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3824 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3825
3826 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3827 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3828 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3829 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3830
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003831- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3832 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3833 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3834
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003835- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3836
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003837- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3838 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3839 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3840 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3841
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003842- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3843 argument.
3844
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003845- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3846 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3847 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3848 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3849 [SF patch 560794].
3850
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003851- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3852 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3853 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003854 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3855 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3856 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003857
3858- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3859 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003860
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003861- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3862 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3863 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3864 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003865
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003866- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3867 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3868 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3869 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3870 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3871
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003872- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003873
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003874- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3875
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003876- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3877 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3878 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3879 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3880 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3881 identical to None.
3882
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003883- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3884 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3885 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3886 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3887 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3888 results now.
3889
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003890- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3891 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3892
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003893- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3894 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3895 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3896 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3897 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3898 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3899 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3900 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3901
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003902- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3903
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003904- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3905 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3906
3907- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3908 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3909 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3910 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3911 and other systems.
3912
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003913- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3914 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3915 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3916 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 +00003917 work well with these.
3918
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003919- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3920
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003921- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003922 connections.
3923
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003924- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3925 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3926 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3927
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003928- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3929 sets
3930
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003931- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3932 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3933 name.
3934
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003935- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3936 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3937 passed in.
3938
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003939- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003940 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003941 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3942 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003943
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003944- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3945
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003946- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3947
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003948- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3949 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3950 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3951
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003952- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3953 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3954 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3955 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003956 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003957
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003958- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003959 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003960 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003961
3962- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3963 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3964 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3965
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003966- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003967 the value of its expression argument.
3968
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003969- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3970 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3971 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3972
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003973- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3974 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3975 skipstone browser was included.
3976
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003977- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3978 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3979
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003980Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003981-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003982
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003983- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3984 names in addition to accepting file names.
3985
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003986- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3987 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3988 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3989 still used and useful.)
3990
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003991- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3992 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3993 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3994 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003995
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003996- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3997 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3998 the generated binary.
3999
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004000Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004001-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004002
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004003- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4004
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004005- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4006 except in the hands of experts.
4007
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004008- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004009 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4010 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4011 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004012
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004013- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4014 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4015 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4016 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4017 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4018 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4019 builds.
4020
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004021- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4022 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4023 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4024 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4025 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4026 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4027 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4028 new type.
4029
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004030- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004031
4032 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4033 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4034 positive infinities.
4035
4036 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4037 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4038 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4039 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4040 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4041 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4042 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4043
4044 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4045
4046 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4047
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004048- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4049 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4050 size of the executable.
4051
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004052- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4053 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4054 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4055 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004056
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004057- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4058
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004059- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4060 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4061 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004062
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004063- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4064 well as Unix.
4065
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004066- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4067 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4068 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4069 modules in the README file for details.
4070
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004071C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004072-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004073
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004074- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4075 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004076 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004077 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004078 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004079
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004080- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4081 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4082 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4083 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4084 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4085 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004086 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004087 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4088 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4089 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4090 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4091 aligned.)
4092
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004093- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4094 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4095 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4096
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004097- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4098 level.
4099
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004100- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4101 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4102 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4103 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4104 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4105
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004106- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4107 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4108 code.
4109
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004110- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4111 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4112 adjusting for negative indices.
4113
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004114- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4115 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4116 object.
4117
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004118- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4119 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4120 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4121
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004122- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4123 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004124
4125- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4126
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004127- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4128 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4129 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4130 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4131
4132- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4133
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004134- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004135
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004136- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004137 without going through the buffer API.
4138
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004139- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004140
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004141- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4142 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4143 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4144 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4145
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004146- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4147 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4148
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004149- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004150 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4151
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004152New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004153-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004154
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004155- OpenVMS is now supported.
4156
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004157- AtheOS is now supported.
4158
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004159- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4160
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004161- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4162
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004163Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004164-----
4165
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004166- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4167 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4168 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004169
4170Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004171-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004172
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004173- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4174 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4175 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4176 bugs.
4177 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004178 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004179 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4180 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004181 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004182
4183- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004184 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004185
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004186- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4187 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4188
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004189- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4190 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004191 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004192 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4193
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004194- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4195 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4196 use files" uninstall option).
4197
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004198- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4199
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004200- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4201 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4202
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004203- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4204 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4205 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4206
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004207- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4208 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4209 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4210 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4211 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004212 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4213 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4214 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004215
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004216- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004217 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004218 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4219 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4220 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4221 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4222 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4223 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4224 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4225 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4226 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4227 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4228 work around.
4229
4230- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4231 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4232 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4233 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4234 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4235 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4236 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4237 specified with O_CREAT too).
4238
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004239Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004240----
4241
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004242- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004243
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004244- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4245 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4246 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4247
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004248- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4249 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4250 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4251
4252- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4253 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4254 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4255 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4256 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4257 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4258 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4259 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004260
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004261- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4262 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4263 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004264
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004265- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4266 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4267 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4268 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4269 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004270
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004271- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4272 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4273 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004274
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004275- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4276 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004277
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004278- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4279 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4280 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4281 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4282 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004283
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004284- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4285 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4286 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4287
4288- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4289 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4290 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004291
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004292- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4293 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4294 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4295 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004296 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004297
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004298- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4299 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004300
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004301- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4302 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004303
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004304- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004305 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004306 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4307 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004308
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004309
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004310What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004311===============================
4312
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004313*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4314
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004315Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004316--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004317
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004318- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4319 with a custom metaclass.
4320
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004321Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004322-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004323
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004324- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4325 are proxies.
4326
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004327Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004328-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004329
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004330- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4331 very short strings.
4332
4333- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4334 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4335 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4336 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4337 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4338
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004339Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004340-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004341
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004342- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4343 close or delete time).
4344
4345- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4346 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4347
4348- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4349
4350- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004351 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004352
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004353Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004354-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004355
4356Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004357-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004358
4359C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004360-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004361
4362New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004363-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004364
4365Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004366-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004367
4368Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004369-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004370
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004371- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4372
4373- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4374 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4375
4376- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4377 deleted at process exit time.
4378
4379- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4380 in backslash.
4381
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004382Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004383----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004384
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004385- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4386 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4387 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4388
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004389
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004390What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004391===========================
4392
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004393*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4394
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004395Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004396--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004397
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004398- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4399 been extensively updated. See
4400
4401 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4402
4403 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4404
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004405- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4406 deleted!
4407
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004408- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4409 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4410 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4411 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4412 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4413
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004414- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4415
4416 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4417 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4418
4419 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4420 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4421 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4422 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4423 supported anyway.
4424
4425 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4426 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4427
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004428- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4429 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4430 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4431 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4432 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004433
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004434- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4435 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4436 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4437
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004438Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004439-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004440
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004441- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4442 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4443 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4444 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4445 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4446 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004447 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4448 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4449 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4450 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004451
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004452- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4453 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4454 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4455
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004456Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004457-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004458
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004459- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4460
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004461Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004462-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004463
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004464- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4465 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4466 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4467 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4468 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4469 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4470
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004471- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4472
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004473- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4474
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004475- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4476
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004477- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4478 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4479 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4480
4481- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4482
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004483Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004484-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004485
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004486- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4487 off a search on Google.
4488
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004489Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004490-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004491
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004492- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4493 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4494 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4495 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4496 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4497 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4498 other platforms should do likewise.
4499
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004500- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4501 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4502 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4503
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004504C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004505-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004506
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004507- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4508 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4509 producing key-value pairs.
4510
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004511- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004512 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004513 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4514 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4515 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4516 previously went unchallenged.
4517
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004518New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004519-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004520
4521Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004522-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004523
4524Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004525-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004526
4527Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004528----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004529
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004530- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4531 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004532
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004533- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4534 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4535 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4536 home.
4537
4538
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004539What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004540===========================
4541
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004542*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4543
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004544Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004545--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004546
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004547- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4548 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004549
4550 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004551 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004552
4553 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4554 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004555 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004556 This needs to be documented.
4557
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004558- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4559 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4560
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004561- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4562 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4563 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4564
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004565- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4566 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4567
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004568- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4569 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4570 class forbids it).
4571
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004572- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4573 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4574 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4575
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004576- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4577
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004578Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004579-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004580
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004581- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4582 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004583 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004584
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004585- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4586 (like 1 + '').
4587
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004588Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004589-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004590
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004591- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4592 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4593 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4594 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004595 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004596 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4597
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004598- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4599 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4600 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4601 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4602
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004603- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4604 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004605 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4606 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4607 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004608
4609- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4610 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004611
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004612- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4613 bytes on its input.
4614
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004615Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004616-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004617
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004618- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004619 convenience function.
4620
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004621- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4622 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4623 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004624 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4625 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4626 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4627 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4628 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4629 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004630
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004631- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4632 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4633 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4634 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4635
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004636- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4637 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4638 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4639
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004640- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4641 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4642 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4643 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4644
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004645- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4646 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004647 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004648 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4649 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4650 new -l and -e options.
4651
4652- statcache is now deprecated.
4653
4654- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4655 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004656 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004657 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4658 time properly taken into account.
4659
4660- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4661 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4662 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4663 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4664
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004665Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004666-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004667
4668Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004669-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004670
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004671- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4672 is built with libdb3 if available.
4673
4674- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4675
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004676C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004677-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004678
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004679- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4680 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4681 PySequence_Size().
4682
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004683- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4684
4685- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4686 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4687 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4688
4689- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4690 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4691
4692- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4693 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4694
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004695New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004696-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004697
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004698- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4699 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4700
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004701- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4702 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4703
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004704- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4705
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004706Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004707-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004708
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004709- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4710 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4711
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004712Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004713-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004714
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004715Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004716----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004717
4718- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4719 removed completely in the next release.
4720
4721- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4722 OSX.
4723
4724- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4725 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4726
4727- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4728
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004729
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004730What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004731===========================
4732
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004733*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4734
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004735Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004736--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004737
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004738- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004739 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004740 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004741 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4742 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004743 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4744 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004745 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4746 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004747
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004748- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4749 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4750
4751- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4752 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4753
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004754Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004755-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004756
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004757- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4758 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4759 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4760 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4761 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4762 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4763 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4764 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4765
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004766- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4767 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4768 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4769 example).
4770
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004771- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004772 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004773 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004774 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004775
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004776- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4777 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4778 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004779 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004780
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004781- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4782 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4783 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4784 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4785 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4786 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4787
4788 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4789
4790 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4791
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004792Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004793-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004794
4795- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4796
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004797- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4798
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004799- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4800 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004801
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004802- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4803 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4804 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4805 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4806 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4807 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004808 attributes.
4809
4810- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4811 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4812 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004813
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004814- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4815 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4816 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004817
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004818- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4819 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4820 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004821 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4822 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4823
4824- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4825 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004826
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004827Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004828-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004829
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004830- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4831 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4832
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004833- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4834 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4835 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4836 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4837
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004838- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4839 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4840 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4841 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4842
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004843 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4844 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4845 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4846 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4847 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4848 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4849 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4850 without losing information).
4851
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004852- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004853 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4854 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4855 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4856 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4857 module).
4858
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004859 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004860 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4861 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4862 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4863 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004864
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004865- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004866 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4867 encoding.
4868
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004869- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4870 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4871
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004872- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004873 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4874
4875- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4876 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4877 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4878 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4879
4880- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4881
4882- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4883 ON, and OFF.
4884
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004885- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4886 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4887
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004888Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004889-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004890
4891- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4892 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4893 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004894
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004895- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4896 been added: -X and -E.
4897
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004898Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004899-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004900
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004901- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4902 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4903
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004904C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004905-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004906
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004907- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4908 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4909 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4910 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4911 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4912
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004913- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4914 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4915 as long) arguments.
4916
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004917- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4918 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4919 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4920 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4921 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4922 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4923
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004924- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4925 input.
4926
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004927New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004928-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004929
4930Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004931-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004932
4933Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004934-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004935
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004936- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4937 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4938 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4939
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004940- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4941 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4942 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004943 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004944
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004945 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4946 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4947 import signal
4948 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004949
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004950 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004951 while 1:
4952 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004953 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004954 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4955 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4956 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4957 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004958
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004959
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004960What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4961===========================
4962
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004963*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4964
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004965Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004966--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004967
4968- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4969 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4970 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4971
4972- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4973 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4974 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4975 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4976 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4977 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4978 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004979
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004980- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004981 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004982 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4983 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4984 associate a docstring with a property.
4985
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004986- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4987 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4988 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4989 other built-in object types.
4990
4991- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4992 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4993 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4994 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4995 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4996
4997- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4998 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4999
5000- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5001 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005002 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005003 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5004 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5005 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5006 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5007 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5008
5009- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5010 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5011 class.
5012
5013- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5014 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5015 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5016 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5017
5018- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5019 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5020 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5021 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5022
5023- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5024 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5025
5026- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5027 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5028 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5029 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5030 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005031 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005032 with the same value as s.
5033
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005034- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5035
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005036Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005037----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005038
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005039- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5040
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005041- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5042 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5043 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5044 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5045 objects.
5046
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005047- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5048 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005049 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5050 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5051
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005052- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5053 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5054 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5055
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005056Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005057-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005058
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005059- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5060 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5061 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5062 by the instances.
5063
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005064- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5065 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5066 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5067
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005068- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5069 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5070 before the entire comparison is complete.
5071
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005072- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5073 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5074 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5075
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005076- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5077 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5078 getwriter().
5079
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005080- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5081 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5082
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005083- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005084 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5085 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5086
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005087- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5088 iterable object.
5089
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005090- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5091 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005092
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005093- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5094 authentication.
5095
5096- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5097 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005098
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005099- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005100 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5101 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5102 a sample driver.)
5103
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005104Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005105-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005106
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005107- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5108 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5109 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5110 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5111 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5112 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5113 kernel has large file support.
5114
5115- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5116 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5117 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5118 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5119 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5120
5121- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5122 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5123 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5124
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005125C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005126-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005127
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005128- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5129 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5130
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005131New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005132-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005133
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005134- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5135 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5136
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005137Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005138-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005139
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005140- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5141 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5142 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5143 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5144 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5145
5146- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5147 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5148 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5149 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5150
5151- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5152 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5153
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005154Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005155-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005156
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005157- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005158 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5159 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005160
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005161
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005162What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5163===========================
5164
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005165*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5166
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005167Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005168----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005169
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005170- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5171 big to represent as a C double.
5172
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005173- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5174 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5175 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5176 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5177 restriction).
5178
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005179- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5180 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5181 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5182 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5183 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5184
5185 >>> dir([])
5186 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5187 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5188 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5189 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5190 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5191 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5192 'reverse', 'sort']
5193
5194 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5195
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005196- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005197 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5198 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5199 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5200 OverflowError exception.
5201
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005202- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005203 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005204 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5205 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5206 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5207 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5208 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005209 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005210 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5211 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5212
5213 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5214 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5215 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5216 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005217
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005218- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005219 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5220 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5221 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5222 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5223 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5224 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5225 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5226 once it is created.
5227
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005228- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5229 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5230 (key, value) pairs.
5231
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005232- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005233 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5234 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5235
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005236- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5237 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5238 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5239 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5240 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005241
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005242- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005243 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5244 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5245
5246 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5247
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005248- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005249 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5250
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005251Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005252-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005253
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005254- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005255 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5256 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005257
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005258- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5259 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5260 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5261 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5262 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5263 in this area anymore).
5264
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005265- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5266 threading.Timer.
5267
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005268- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5269 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5270
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005271- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005272 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5273
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005274- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005275 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5276 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5277 converted to Python longs.
5278
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005279- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005280 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5281
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005282- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5283 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5284 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5285
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005286Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005287-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005288
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005289- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5290 division operators as per PEP 238.
5291
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005292Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005293-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005294
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005295- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5296 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5297 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5298 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5299
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005300C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005301-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005302
5303- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005304
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005305- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5306 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005307 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005308
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005309 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5310 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005311 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005312 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005313
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005314- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005315 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5316 module:
5317
5318 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005319
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005320 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5321 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005322
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005323 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5324 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005325
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005326 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5327
5328 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5329
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005330- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005331 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5332 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5333 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005334
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005335New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005336-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005337
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005338- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5339 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5340 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5341 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5342 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005343
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005344Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005345-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005346
5347Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005348-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005349
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005350- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5351 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5352 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5353 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005354 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5355 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5356 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5357 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5358 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005359
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005360- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005361 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5362
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005363
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005364What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5365===========================
5366
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005367*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5368
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005369Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005370-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005371
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005372- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5373 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5374
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005375- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5376 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5377 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005378
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005379- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5380 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5381 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5382 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005383
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005384- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5385
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005386- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005387
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005388Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005389-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005390
5391- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005392 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005393 the module docstring for details.
5394
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005395Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005396-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005397
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005398- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005399 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5400 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5401 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005402
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005403- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5404 Nick Mathewson.
5405
5406Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005407----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005408
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005409- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5410 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5411 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5412 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5413 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5414 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5415 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5416 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5417
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005418- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5419 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5420 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5421 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5422
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005423- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5424 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5425 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5426 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5427 come a long way).
5428
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005429- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5430 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5431 write filters for these warnings).
5432
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005433- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5434 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5435 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5436 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5437 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5438
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005439- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5440 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5441 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5442 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5443 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5444 older distribution.
5445
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005446Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005447-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005448
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005449- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5450 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005451 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005452
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005453- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5454 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5455 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5456
5457- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5458
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005459- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5460
5461- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5462
5463- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5464
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005465- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005466
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005467- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5468
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005469New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005470-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005471
5472C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005473-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005474
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005475- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5476 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5477 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5478 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5479 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5480 against buffer overruns.
5481
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005482- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005483 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5484 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005485 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5486 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5487 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5488
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005489- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5490 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5491 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5492 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5493 deprecated.
5494
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005495Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005496-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005497
5498- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5499 relevant is found.
5500
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005501
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005502What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005503===========================
5504
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005505*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5506
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005507Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005508----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005509
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005510- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5511 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5512 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5513 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5514 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5515 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5516 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5517 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005518 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005519 repaired.
5520
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005521- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005522 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005523 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5524 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5525 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5526 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5527 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5528 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5529 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5530 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5531
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005532- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5533 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5534 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5535 leading BMO character).
5536
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005537- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5538 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5539 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5540
5541 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5542 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5543 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005544
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005545 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5546 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5547 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5548 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5549 for various simple to use conversions.
5550
5551 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5552 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5553
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005554 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5555 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5556 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5557 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5558 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5559 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5560 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5561 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5562 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5563 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5564 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5565 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5566 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5567 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5568 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005569
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005570- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5571 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5572 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005573 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005574 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005575
5576 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005577 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5578 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5579 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5580 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5581 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005582 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5583 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005584
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005585 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5586 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5587 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005588 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005589
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005590- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5591 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5592 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5593 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5594 floating arithmetic,
5595
5596 x = 9007199254740992.0
5597 print long(x)
5598
5599 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5600 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5601 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5602 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5603 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5604 functions are of good quality).
5605
5606 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5607 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5608 algorithms to break.
5609
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005610- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5611 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5612 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5613 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5614 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5615 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5616 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5617 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5618 order.
5619
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005620- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5621 operation along the most common code paths.
5622
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005623- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5624 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5625
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005626- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5627 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5628 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5629 {}.update(UserDict())
5630
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005631- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5632 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5633 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5634 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5635 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5636 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5637 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5638 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5639
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005640- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005641 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005642
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005643 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005644 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5645 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005646 join() method of strings
5647 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005648 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5649 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005650 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005651 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005652
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005653- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5654 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5655
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005656- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5657 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5658
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005659- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5660 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5661 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5662 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5663
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005664- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5665 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005666 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005667 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5668 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005669
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005670- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5671
5672
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005673Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005674-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005675
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005676- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005677 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005678 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5679 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5680
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005681- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5682 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5683
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005684- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5685 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5686 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5687 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5688
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005689- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5690 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5691 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5692
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005693- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5694
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005695- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5696
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005697- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5698 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5699 that are still imported into string.py).
5700
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005701- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5702
5703- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5704 Now it does.
5705
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005706- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5707
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005708- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5709 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5710 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5711 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5712 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005713 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5714 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005715
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005716- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5717 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5718 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5719 'help(object)'.
5720
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005721Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005722-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005723
5724- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005725 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005726 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5727 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5728
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005729- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005730 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5731 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005732
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005733C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005734-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005735
5736- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5737 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005738
5739----
5740
5741**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**