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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
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000015- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
16 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
17 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
18
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000019- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
20 configure would break checking curses.h.
21
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000022- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
23 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
24
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000025- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
26
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000027- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
28
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000029- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
30
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000031- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
32 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
33
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000034- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
35 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
36 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
37
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000038- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
39 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000040 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000041
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000042- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
43 now encodes backslash correctly.
44
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000045- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
46
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000047- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
48 and long longs.
49
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000050- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
51 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
52 message in this case.
53
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000054- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
55 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
56 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
57 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
58 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
59
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000060- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000061
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000062- Speed up some Unicode operations.
63
64- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
65
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000066- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000067 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
68
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000069- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
70
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000071- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
72 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
73
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000074- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
75
76- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
77
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000078- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
79 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
80 was empty.
81
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000082- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
83 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
84
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000085- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000086 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000087
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000088- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
89 codes.
90
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000091- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
92 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
93 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
94
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000095- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
96 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
97
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000098- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000099 (fixes bug #1119418).
100
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000101- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
102
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000103- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
104 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
105
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000106- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
107 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
108 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
109
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000110- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
111
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000112- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
113 reference counts in some error exit cases.
114
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000115- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
116 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
117 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
118 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
119 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
120 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
121 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
122 realloc.
123
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000124- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
125 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
126
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000127- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
128 like their int counterparts.
129
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000130- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
131 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
132 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
133 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
134 for a longer write-up of the problem).
135
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000136- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
137 serializing floats.
138
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000139- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
140 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
141 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
142
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000143- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
144 278.
145
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000146- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
147 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
148 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
149 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000150 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000151 PyNumber_*().
152 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
153
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000154- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
155 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
156 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
157 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
158
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000159- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
160 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
161 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
162 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
163 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
164
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000165- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
166 disabled caused a crash.
167
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000168- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
169 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
170
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000171- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000172 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
173
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000174- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
175
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000176- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000177 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
178 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
179 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000180
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000181- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
182
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000183- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
184 returning None.
185
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000186- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000187 ('\') with a specific error message.
188
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000189- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
190
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000191- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
192 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
193
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000194- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000195 an ferror() call.
196
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000197- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
198 list.sort().
199
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000200- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
201 (2+3) --> (5).
202
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000203- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
204
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000205- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
206 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000207
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000208- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
209 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
210 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
211
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000212- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
213 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
214 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
215
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000216Extension Modules
217-----------------
218
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000219- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
220 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
221 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
222
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000223- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
224 without prior setting of the userptr.
225
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000226- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
227
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000228- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
229
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000230- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
231 problem on AIX.
232
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000233- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
234
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000235- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
236
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000237- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
238
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000239- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
240 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
241
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000242- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
243
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000244- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
245 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
246
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000247- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
248
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000249- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
250 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
251
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000252- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
253 returns in cStringIO.c.
254
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000255- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
256 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
257
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000258- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
259
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000260- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
261
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000262- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
263 the file system encoding.
264
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000265- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
266 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000267
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000268- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
269
270- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000271 line without newlines.
272
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000273- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
274 on Windows.
275
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000276- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000277 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
278
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000279- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
280 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
281 for large or negative values.
282
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000283- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000284 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000285
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000286- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
287
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000288- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
289 if available on the platform.
290
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000291- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
292 available on the platform.
293
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000294- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
295 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
296
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000297- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
298
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000299- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
300 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
301 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
302
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000303- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
304
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000305- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
306 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
307
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000308- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000309 file size.
310
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000311- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
312
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000313- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
314 {remove_history,replace_history}
315
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000316- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
317 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000318
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000319- stat_float_times is now True.
320
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000321- array.array objects are now picklable.
322
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000323- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
324 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
325
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000326- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
327 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
328 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
329
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000330- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
331 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000332
333Library
334-------
335
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000336- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
337
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000338- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
339
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000340- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
341 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
342 LoadError subclasses IOError.
343
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000344- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000345 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
346 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
347 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
348 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
349
350 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
351 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
352 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
353 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
354 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000355
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000356- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
357 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
358 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
359
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000360- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
361
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000362- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
363
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000364- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
365 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
366 illegal argument)
367
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000368- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
369 is an error in the format string.
370
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000371- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
372
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000373- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000374 "parent" argument.
375
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000376- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
377 for padding.
378
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000379- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
380 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
381
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000382- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
383 to get the correct encoding.
384
385- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
386 languages.
387
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000388- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
389
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000390- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
391
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000392- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
393
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000394- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
395 functionality.
396
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000397- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
398
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000399- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
400 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
401
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000402- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
403 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
404 match the Content-Length header.
405
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000406- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
407
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000408- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
409 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000410 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000411
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000412- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
413
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000414- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
415
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000416- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
417 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
418
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000419- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
420 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
421 Tkdnd.
422
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000423- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
424 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
425
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000426- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
427 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
428
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000429- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000430 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
431
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000432- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
433 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
434
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000435- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
436 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
437
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000438- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000439 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000440
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000441- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
442
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000443- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
444 error messages.
445
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000446- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
447
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000448- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
449 Bug #1224621.
450
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000451- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
452 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
453 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
454 terminates by raising StopIteration.
455
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000456- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
457
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000458- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
459 component of the path.
460
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000461- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
462 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
463 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
464 class at all.
465
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000466- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
467 files to PyPI.
468
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000469- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
470 them to PyPI.
471
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000472- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
473 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
474 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
475 work as expected.
476
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000477- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
478 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
479
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000480- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000481 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
482
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000483- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
484
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000485- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
486 to build.
487
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000488- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
489 symbolic links on Windows.
490
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000491- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000492 profile.py if available.
493
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000494- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
495
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000496- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
497 in LWPCookieJar.
498
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000499- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
500
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000501- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
502
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000503- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
504
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000505- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
506
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000507- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
508
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000509- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
510
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000511- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
512
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000513- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
514
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000515- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
516 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
517 be exploited in various ways.
518
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000519- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000520 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
521
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000522- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
523 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
524
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000525- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000526 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
527
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000528- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
529
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000530- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
531
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000532- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
533
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000534- Enhancements to the csv module:
535
536 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000537 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000538 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000539 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
540 reporting.
541 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
542 dictates.
543 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000544 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000545 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000546 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
547 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000548 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
549 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000550 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000551 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
552 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
553 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
554 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
555 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
556 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
557 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
558 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
559 without first creating a dialect class.
560 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
561 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
562 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000563 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000564 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
565 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000566 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
567 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
568 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
569 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000570 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
571 This has been fixed.
572
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000573- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
574 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
575 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
576 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
577
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000578- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
579
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000580- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
581 (Bug #951915).
582
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000583- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
584 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
585 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000586 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000587
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000588- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
589
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000590- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
591 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
592
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000593- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
594
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000595- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
596
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000597- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
598
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000599- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
600
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000601- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
602
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000603- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
604 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
605 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
606
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000607- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000608 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000609
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000610- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
611 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
612 tokenizer with very long source lines.
613
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000614- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
615 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
616 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000617
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000618- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
619 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000620
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000621- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
622 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
623
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000624- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
625 correctly.
626
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000627- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
628 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
629 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
630 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
631 between two lines.
632
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000633- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
634 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
635 handlers.
636
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000637- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000638 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
639 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000640
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000641- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
642 considering it exactly like a '*'.
643
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000644- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
645 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000646
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000647- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
648
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000649Build
650-----
651
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000652- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
653
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000654- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
655 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
656
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000657- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
658
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000659- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
660 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
661
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000662- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
663 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
664
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000665- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
666 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
667 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000668 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000669
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000670- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
671 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
672 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
673
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000674- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
675
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000676- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
677 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
678
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000679- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
680 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
681 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
682 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
683 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
684 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
685 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
686 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
687
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000688- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
689 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
690 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
691 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
692
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000693C API
694-----
695
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000696- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
697
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000698- Removed PyRange_New().
699
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000700- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
701 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
702 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
703 mappings.
704
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000705
706Tests
707-----
708
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000709- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000710
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000711- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
712 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
713
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000714
715Documentation
716-------------
717
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000718- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
719
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000720- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
721
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000722- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
723
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000724- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
725
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000726- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
727
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000728- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
729
730- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
731
732- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
733
734- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
735
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000736- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
737 Closes bug #1166582.
738
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000739- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
740 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
741 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
742
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000743Mac
744---
745
746
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000747New platforms
748-------------
749
750- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
751
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000752
753Tools/Demos
754-----------
755
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000756- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
757 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
758 source files that need an encoding declaration.
759 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
760
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000761- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
762
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000763- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000764
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000765- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
766 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000767
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000768What's New in Python 2.4 final?
769===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000770
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000771*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000772
773Core and builtins
774-----------------
775
776- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
777 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
778 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
779
780
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000781What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
782==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000783
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000784*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000785
786Core and builtins
787-----------------
788
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000789- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
790 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
791 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
792
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000793
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000794Library
795-------
796
797- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
798 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
799 raised is re-raised.
800
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000801- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
802 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
803
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000804- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
805 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
806 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
807 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
808 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
809 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
810 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
811 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
812 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
813 by the slice are recomputed now.
814
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000815- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000816
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000817Build
818-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000819
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000820- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
821 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
822 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000823
824C API
825-----
826
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000827- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
828
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000829
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000830What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
831================================
832
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000833*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000834
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000835License
836-------
837
838The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
839is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
840changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
841Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
842intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
843durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
844the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
845License::
846
847 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
848
849says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
850to Python 2.1.1.
851
852The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
853License Version 2.
854
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000855Core and builtins
856-----------------
857
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000858- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
859 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
860 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
861 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
862 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
863 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
864 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000865 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000866 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
867 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
868
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000869- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000870
871Extension Modules
872-----------------
873
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000874- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
875 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
876 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
877 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000878
879Library
880-------
881
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000882- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
883 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
884 returned.
885
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000886- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
887
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000888- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
889 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
890
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000891- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
892
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000893- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
894 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000895
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000896- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
897
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000898- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
899
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000900- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000901 the source code is updated and reloaded.
902
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000903Build
904-----
905
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000906- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000907
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000908What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
909================================
910
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000911*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000912
913Core and builtins
914-----------------
915
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000916- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000917 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
918
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000919- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
920 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
921 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
922 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
923
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000924- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
925 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
926
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000927- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
928 constant.
929
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000930- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
931 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
932 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
933 large), and to anomalies such as
934 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
935 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
936 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
937 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000938
939Extension modules
940-----------------
941
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000942- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
943 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000944 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
945 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
946 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000947
948Library
949-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000950
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000951- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000952 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000953 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
954 --swig-cpp.
955
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000956- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
957 it is set.
958
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000959- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000960
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000961- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
962 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
963 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
964 Closes bug #1039270.
965
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000966- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000967
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000968 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000969 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
970 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
971 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
972 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
973 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
974 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
975 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
976 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
977 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
978 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
979 + Updates to documentation.
980
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000981- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
982 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
983 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
984 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
985
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000986- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000987
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000988- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
989 applications should use the getmember function.
990
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000991- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
992
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000993- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
994 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
995 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
996 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
997 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
998 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
999 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1000 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1001 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1002
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001003- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1004 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001005 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001006
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001007- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1008 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1009 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1010 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1011 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1012 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1013 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1014 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001015
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001016- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1017 the new public features (of which there are many).
1018
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001019- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001020 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1021 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1022 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1023 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001024 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001025
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001026- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1027
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001028- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1029 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1030 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1031 options.
1032
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001033- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1034 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1035 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1036 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1037 conditions under which non-string values work.
1038
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001039Build
1040-----
1041
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001042- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1043 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1044 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1045
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001046- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1047 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1048 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1049 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1050 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001051
1052C API
1053-----
1054
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001055- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1056 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1057
1058- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1059
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001060- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1061 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1062 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1063 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1064 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1065 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1066 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1067 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1068 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1069
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001070- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1071
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001072- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1073 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1074 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001075
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001076Tests
1077-----
1078
1079- test__locale ported to unittest
1080
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001081Mac
1082---
1083
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001084- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1085 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1086 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001087
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001088Tools/Demos
1089-----------
1090
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001091- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1092 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1093 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1094 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1095 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001096
1097
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001098What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1099=================================
1100
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001101*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001102
1103Core and builtins
1104-----------------
1105
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001106- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001107 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1108
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001109- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1110 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1111 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1112 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1113 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1114 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1115 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1116 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001117 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1118 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1119 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1120 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1121 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001122
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001123- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1124 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1125 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1126 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1127 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1128
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001129- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1130
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001131- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1132 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1133
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001134- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1135 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1136 modified the list.
1137
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001138- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1139 functions is now writable.
1140
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001141- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1142 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1143 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1144 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1145
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001146- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1147 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1148 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1149 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1150 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001151
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001152- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1153 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1154
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001155Extension modules
1156-----------------
1157
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001158- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1159
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001160- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1161 data.
1162
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001163- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1164 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1165 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1166 supposed to have been truncated away.
1167
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001168- Added socket.socketpair().
1169
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001170- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1171 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1172
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001173- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001174 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1175
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001176Library
1177-------
1178
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001179- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001180 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001181
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001182- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1183 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1184
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001185- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1186 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1187
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001188- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1189
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001190- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1191 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001192
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001193- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1194 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1195
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001196- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1197
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001198- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1199
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001200- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1201
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001202- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1203 Percivall.
1204
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001205- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1206 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1207
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001208- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1209 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1210 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001211 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001212
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001213- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1214 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1215 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1216 and exponent.
1217
1218- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1219
1220- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001221 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001222 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1223
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001224- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1225 to the readline module.
1226
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001227- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001228 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1229 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001230
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001231- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1232 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1233 contains symlinks.
1234
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001235- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1236 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1237
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001238- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1239 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1240 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1241
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001242- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1243 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1244 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1245 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1246 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1247 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1248 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1249 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1250 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1251 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1252 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1253 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1254 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1255
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001256- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1257
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001258Tools/Demos
1259-----------
1260
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001261- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1262 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1263
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001264- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1265
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001266Build
1267-----
1268
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001269- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1270 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1271 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1272 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1273 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1274 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1275 plans to do so.
1276
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001277- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1278 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1279
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001280- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1281 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1282
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001283- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1284 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1285
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001286- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1287 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1288
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001289- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1290 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1291
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001292C API
1293-----
1294
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001295..
1296
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001297Documentation
1298-------------
1299
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001300- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1301 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1302
1303- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1304 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1305 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001306
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001307New platforms
1308-------------
1309
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001310- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1311
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001312Tests
1313-----
1314
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001315..
1316
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001317Windows
1318-------
1319
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001320- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1321 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1322 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1323 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1324 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1325 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1326 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1327 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1328 the problem.
1329
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001330Mac
1331---
1332
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001333..
1334
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001335
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001336What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1337=================================
1338
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001339*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001340
1341Core and builtins
1342-----------------
1343
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001344- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1345 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1346 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1347 sensitive code.
1348
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001349- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001350 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001351
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001352 @staticmethod
1353 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001354
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001355 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001356
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001357- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1358 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1359 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1360 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1361 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1362 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1363 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1364 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1365 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1366 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1367 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1368
1369 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1370 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1371 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1372 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1373 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1374 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1375 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1376
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001377- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1378 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1379
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001380- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001381 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001382
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001383- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001384 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001385 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1386
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001387- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001388 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1389 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1390
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001391- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1392 types that support garbage collection.
1393
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001394- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1395
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001396- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1397 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1398 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1399 Jython.
1400
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001401- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1402
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001403- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1404 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1405
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001406- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1407 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1408 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001409
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001410- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1411 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1412 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1413
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001414Extension modules
1415-----------------
1416
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001417- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1418
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001419Library
1420-------
1421
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001422- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1423 TIS-620
1424
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001425- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1426 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1427 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1428 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1429 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1430 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1431 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1432 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1433 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1434 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1435
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001436- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1437
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001438- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1439 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1440 same as when the argument is omitted).
1441 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1442
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001443- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1444
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001445- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1446 schemes are offered.
1447
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001448- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1449
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001450- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1451 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1452 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1453
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001454- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1455
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001456- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1457 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1458
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001459- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1460 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1461 when dummy_threading is being used.
1462
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001463- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1464 from a tarfile.
1465
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001466- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001467 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001468
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001469- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1470 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1471 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1472 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1473
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001474- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1475 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1476
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001477- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1478 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1479 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1480 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1481 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1482 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1483 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1484 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1485 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1486 by some other method in progress).
1487
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001488- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1489 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1490 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001491
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001492- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1493
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001494- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1495 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1496 AM Kuchling.
1497
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001498- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1499 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1500 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1501
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001502- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1503 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1504 instead of unsigned.
1505
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001506- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001507 no longer part of the public API.
1508
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001509- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1510 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1511 string methods of the same name).
1512
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001513- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001514 SF patch 945642.
1515
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001516- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1517
1518 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1519
1520 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1521 DocTestSuites.
1522
1523- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1524 that provide thread-local data.
1525
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001526- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1527 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1528
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001529- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1530
1531- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1532 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1533 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1534
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001535- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1536
1537 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1538 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1539 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001540
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001541 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1542 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1543 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1544 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1545
1546 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1547 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1548
1549 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1550 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1551 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1552 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1553
1554 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1555 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1556 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1557 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1558 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1559
1560 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1561 wrapping help output.
1562
1563 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1564 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1565 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001566
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001567C API
1568-----
1569
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001570- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1571 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1572 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1573 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1574 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1575 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1576 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1577 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1578 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1579 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1580 its visible semantics have not changed.
1581
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001582- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1583 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1584
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001585Documentation
1586-------------
1587
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001588- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001589
1590 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001591 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001592
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001593 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001594
1595 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1596
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001597- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001598
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001599Tests
1600-----
1601
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001602- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001603 platforms that use the Makefile.
1604
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001605- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1606 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1607 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1608
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001609
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001610What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1611=================================
1612
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001613*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001614
1615Core and builtins
1616-----------------
1617
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001618- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1619 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1620 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1621 objects now (one object instead of three).
1622
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001623- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1624 Windows DLLs.
1625
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001626- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1627 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001628
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001629- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1630 a new .pyc magic.
1631
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001632- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1633 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1634 be there.
1635
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001636- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1637 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1638 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1639
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001640- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1641 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1642 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1643
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001644- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1645
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001646- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1647 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1648 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001649
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001650- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1651 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1652
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001653- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1654
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001655- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001656 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001657
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001658- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1659
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001660- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1661
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001662- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1663 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1664
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001665- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1666 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1667 Fixes bug #858016 .
1668
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001669- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1670 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1671 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1672
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001673- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1674 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1675 improves their performance (about 35%).
1676
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001677- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1678 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1679 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1680
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001681- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1682 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1683 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1684 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1685
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001686- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1687 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001688 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001689 length is not known).
1690
1691- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1692 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001693 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1694 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001695 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1696
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001697- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1698 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1699
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001700- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1701 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1702 keyword arguments.
1703
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001704- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1705 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1706 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1707
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001708- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1709 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1710 cases.
1711
1712- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1713 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1714 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1715 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1716 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1717 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1718 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1719 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1720 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1721 a release build.
1722
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001723- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1724 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1725
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001726- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001727 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001728
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001729- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1730 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1731 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1732 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1733 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1734 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1735 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1736 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1737 destroyed.
1738
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001739- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1740 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1741 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1742 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1743 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1744 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1745 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1746 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1747
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001748- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1749 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1750 character other than a space.
1751
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001752- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1753 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1754 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1755 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1756 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1757 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1758 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1759 attributes with the same name.
1760
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001761- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1762 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1763 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1764 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1765 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1766 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1767 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1768 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1769 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1770 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1771 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1772 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1773 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1774 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001775
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001776- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1777 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1778 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1779 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1780 This has been repaired.
1781
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001782- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1783
1784- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1785
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001786- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1787 over a sequence.
1788
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001789- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001790 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001791
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001792- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1793
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001794- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1795 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1796 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1797 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1798 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1799 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1800 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1801 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1802
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001803- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1804 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1805 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1806
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001807- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1808 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1809 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1810 freelist.
1811
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001812- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1813 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1814
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001815- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1816 number.
1817
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001818- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1819 a TypeError exception.
1820
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001821- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1822 820195.
1823
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001824- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1825 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1826 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1827
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001828- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001829 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1830 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001831
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001832- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1833 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1834 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1835
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001836- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1837 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001838 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001839
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001840- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001841 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1842 the first call.
1843
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001844
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001845Extension modules
1846-----------------
1847
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001848- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1849 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1850
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001851- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1852 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1853 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1854 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1855 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1856 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1857 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001858
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001859- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1860
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001861- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1862
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001863- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1864 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1865
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001866- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1867 fewer false positives.
1868
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001869- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1870 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1871
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001872- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001873 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1874
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001875- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001876 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001877 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001878 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1879 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001880
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001881- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1882 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1883 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1884 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1885
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001886- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1887 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1888 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1889 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1890 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1891 #897625.
1892
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001893- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1894 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1895
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001896- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1897 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1898 and pops on either side of the deque.
1899
1900- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1901 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1902
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001903- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1904 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1905 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1906 other functions that expect a function argument.
1907
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001908- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1909
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001910- os.getsid was added.
1911
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001912- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1913 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1914 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1915
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001916- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1917
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001918- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1919
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001920- readline.clear_history was added.
1921
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001922- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1923
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001924- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1925
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001926- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1927
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001928- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1929
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001930- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1931
1932- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1933
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001934- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1935
1936- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1937
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001938- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1939 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1940 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1941
1942- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1943 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1944 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1945 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1946 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1947 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1948 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1949
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001950- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1951 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1952 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1953 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001954
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001955- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001956 iterators from a single iterable.
1957
1958- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1959 of raising a TypeError exception.
1960
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001961- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1962 as parameter.
1963
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001964Library
1965-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001966
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001967- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1968
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001969- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1970 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1971 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001972
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001973- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1974 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1975 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001976
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001977- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001978
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001979- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1980 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001981
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001982- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1983 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1984
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001985- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1986
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001987- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001988 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001989
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001990- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001991 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001992
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001993- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1994
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001995- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1996 on cygwin and mingw32.
1997
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001998- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1999
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002000- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2001 module.
2002
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002003- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2004 installation scheme for all platforms.
2005
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002006- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002007 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002008
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002009- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2010 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2011 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2012
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002013- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2014 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2015 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2016
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002017- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2018
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002019- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2020
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002021- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2022 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2023
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002024- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2025 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2026 type pattern with the same value exists.
2027
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002028- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2029 when run from the command prompt).
2030
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002031- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2032 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2033
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002034- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2035 default sort).
2036
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002037- Added global runctx function to profile module
2038
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002039- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2040
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002041- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2042
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002043- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2044
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002045- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002046 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2047 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2048 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2049 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2050 accordingly.
2051
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002052- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2053 decoding standards.
2054
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002055- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2056 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2057 called for all requests.
2058
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002059- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2060 they are passed to the compiler.
2061
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002062- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2063 indent, width and depth.
2064
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002065- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2066 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2067
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002068- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2069 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2070
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002071- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2072
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002073- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2074
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002075- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2076
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002077- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2078 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2079
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002080- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002081 for better performance.
2082
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002083- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002084
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002085- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2086 a string).
2087
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002088- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2089
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002090- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2091
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002092- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2093
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002094- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2095
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002096- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2097 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2098 list of fieldnames.
2099
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002100- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2101 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2102
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002103- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2104
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002105- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2106 empty lists.
2107
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002108- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2109 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2110 and shelves.
2111
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002112- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2113 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2114
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002115- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002116 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2117 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002118
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002119- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2120 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002121 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002122
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002123- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002124 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2125 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2126
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002127- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2128 and removed in Py2.4.
2129
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002130- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2131
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002132- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2133
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002134Tools/Demos
2135-----------
2136
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002137- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2138 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2139
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002140- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2141
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002142- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2143 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2144 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2145 destination in situations where both files are given.
2146
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002147- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2148 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2149 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2150 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2151
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002152- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2153
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002154- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2155 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2156 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2157 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2158 now.
2159
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002160- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2161 in effect
2162
2163- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2164 C-c C-h
2165
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002166- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2167 -d option was given.
2168
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002169Build
2170-----
2171
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002172- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2173 build under OS X.
2174
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002175- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2176 --enable-profiling.
2177
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002178- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2179 is configured --with-tsc.
2180
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002181- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2182 on AMD64.
2183
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002184- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2185 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2186
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002187- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2188 removed.
2189
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002190- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2191 supported (see PEP 11).
2192
2193- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2194
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002195- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2196
2197- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2198 (see PEP 11).
2199
2200- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2201 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2202
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002203C API
2204-----
2205
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002206- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2207 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2208 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2209
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002210- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2211 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2212 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2213 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2214
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002215- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2216 generator objects.
2217
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002218- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2219 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002220 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2221 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002222
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002223- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2224 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2225
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002226- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2227 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2228 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2229 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2230 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2231
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002232- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2233 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2234 about 10% faster.
2235
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002236- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2237 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2238
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002239- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2240 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2241 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2242 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2243
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002244Windows
2245-------
2246
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002247- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2248 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2249 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2250 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2251
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002252- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2253 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2254 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2255
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002256
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002257What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2258===============================
2259
2260*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2261
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002262IDLE
2263----
2264
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002265- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2266 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2267 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2268 context-menu actions.
2269
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002270- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2271 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2272 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2273 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2274 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2275 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2276 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2277 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2278 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2279
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002280
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002281What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2282=============================================
2283
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002284*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002285
2286Core and builtins
2287-----------------
2288
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002289- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002290 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002291 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2292
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002293Extension modules
2294-----------------
2295
2296- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2297 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2298 than once. This has been fixed.
2299
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002300- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2301 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2302 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2303 call.
2304
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002305- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2306
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002307Library
2308-------
2309
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002310- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2311 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2312
2313- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2314 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2315 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2316 restored.
2317
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002318IDLE
2319----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002320
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002321- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002322
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002323Build
2324-----
2325
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002326- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2327 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2328
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002329C API
2330-----
2331
2332Windows
2333-------
2334
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002335- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2336 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2337
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002338- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2339
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002340Mac
2341---
2342
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002343- Various fixes to pimp.
2344
2345- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2346
2347- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2348 more problems than it solves.
2349
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002350
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002351What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2352=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002353
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002354*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2355
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002356Core and builtins
2357-----------------
2358
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002359- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2360 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2361
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002362- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2363 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002364 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002365
2366- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2367 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2368 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002369 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002370
2371- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2372 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002373
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002374- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2375 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2376 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2377
2378- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002379 770247.
2380
2381- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002382
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002383Extension modules
2384-----------------
2385
2386- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2387 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2388
2389- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2390
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002391- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2392
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002393- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2394 contained within the _strptime module.
2395
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002396- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2397 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2398
2399- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002400 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2401
2402- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2403 the find_class attribute, if present.
2404
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002405- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002406
2407 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2408 (SF bug 763298).
2409
2410 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002411 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2412 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2413 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002414
2415 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2416
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002417Library
2418-------
2419
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002420- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2421
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002422- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2423 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2424 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2425 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2426 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2427 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2428 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2429 or Tester().
2430
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002431- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2432 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2433 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2434 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2435 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2436 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2437 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2438 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2439 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002440
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002441 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002442
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002443- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2444 weren't before was an oversight.
2445
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002446- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2447 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2448
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002449- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2450 when there are no lines.
2451
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002452- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2453 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2454
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002455- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2456 to child processes.
2457
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002458- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2459
2460- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2461
2462- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2463 xmlrpclib.
2464
2465- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2466 responses.
2467
2468- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2469 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2470
2471- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2472 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2473 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2474
2475- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2476 used as patterns.
2477
2478- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2479 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2480 than Tk 8.3.
2481
2482- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2483
2484- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002485
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002486Tools/Demos
2487-----------
2488
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002489- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2490
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002491- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2492
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002493- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002494
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002495Build
2496-----
2497
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002498- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2499
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002500- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2501
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002502- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2503 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002504
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002505- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2506 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2507 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002508
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002509C API
2510-----
2511
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002512- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2513 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2514
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002515Windows
2516-------
2517
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002518- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2519 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2520 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2521 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2522 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2523 Python exception ::
2524
2525 thread.error: can't start new thread
2526
2527 is raised now.
2528
2529- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2530 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2531 instead of from DLL teardown.
2532
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002533Mac
2534---
2535
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002536- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002537 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002538 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2539 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2540 the executable in the bundle.
2541
2542- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002543
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002544- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2545
2546- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2547 on Panther.
2548
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002549What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2550================================
2551
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002552*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002553
2554Core and builtins
2555-----------------
2556
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002557- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2558 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2559 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2560 with the -i option.
2561
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002562- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2563 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2564
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002565- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2566 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2567
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002568- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2569 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2570 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2571 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2572 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2573 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2574 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2575 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2576 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2577 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2578 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2579 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2580 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002581
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002582- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2583 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2584 embedded in a lambda expression.
2585
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002586- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2587 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2588 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2589 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2590 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2591
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002592- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2593 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2594 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2595
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002596- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2597 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2598
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002599- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2600 It's writable again.
2601
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002602- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2603 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2604 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002605 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002606
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002607- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2608 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2609 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2610
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002611Extension modules
2612-----------------
2613
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002614- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2615 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2616
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002617- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2618 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2619 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2620 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2621
2622- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2623 collection.
2624
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002625- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2626 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2627 unique within a single program run.
2628
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002629- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2630 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2631
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002632- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2633 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2634
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002635- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2636 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002637
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002638- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2639
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002640- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2641 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2642
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002643- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2644 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2645 for many BSD-derived systems.
2646
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002647
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002648Library
2649-------
2650
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002651- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2652 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2653 primary ones:
2654
2655 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2656 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2657 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2658
2659 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2660 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2661 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2662 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2663 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2664 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2665
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002666- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2667 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2668 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2669 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2670 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2671 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2672 argument.
2673
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002674- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2675 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2676 in the archive.
2677
2678- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2679 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2680
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002681- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2682 569574).
2683
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002684- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2685 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2686 no more.
2687
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002688- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2689 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2690 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2691 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2692 code coverage.
2693
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002694- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2695 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2696 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002697 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2698 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002699
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002700- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2701 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2702 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002703 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002704
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002705- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2706
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002707- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2708 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2709 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2710 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2711
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002712- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2713 handling.
2714
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002715- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2716 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2717
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002718- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2719 in socket.py.
2720
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002721- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2722
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002723- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2724 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2725 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2726 opener with proxy support.
2727
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002728- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2729
2730- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2731
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002732Tools/Demos
2733-----------
2734
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002735- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2736
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002737- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2738
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002739- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2740 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002741
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002742- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2743 files.
2744
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002745Build
2746-----
2747
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002748- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002749 different root directory.
2750
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002751C API
2752-----
2753
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002754- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2755 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2756 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2757 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2758 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2759 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2760 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2761 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2762 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2763 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2764
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002765- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2766 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2767 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2768 from Python.
2769
2770
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002771New platforms
2772-------------
2773
2774None this time.
2775
2776Tests
2777-----
2778
2779- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2780 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2781
2782Windows
2783-------
2784
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002785- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2786
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002787- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2788 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2789 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2790 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2791 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2792 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2793 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2794 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2795 that's what it's for.
2796
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002797Mac
2798---
2799
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002800- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2801 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2802 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2803 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002804- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2805 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2806- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002807
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002808SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2809------------------------------------
2810
2811430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2812598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2813622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2814661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2815683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2816697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2817713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2818724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2819727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2820729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2821730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2822731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2823732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2824733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2825735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2826740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2827744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2828745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2829747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2830749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2831751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2832753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2833755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2834757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2835760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2836
2837
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002838What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2839================================
2840
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002841*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002842
2843Core and builtins
2844-----------------
2845
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002846- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2847 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2848
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002849- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2850 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2851 and cannot be strings).
2852
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002853- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2854 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2855 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2856 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2857
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002858- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2859 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2860 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2861 Python itself.
2862
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002863- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2864 the referenced object, if it has one.
2865
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002866- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2867 the thread started at
2868 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2869
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002870- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2871 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2872 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2873 placed on a list index.
2874
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002875- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2876 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2877 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2878 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2879
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002880- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2881 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2882 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2883 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2884 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2885 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2886 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2887
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002888- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2889 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2890 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2891 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2892 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2893
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002894- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2895 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002896
2897- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2898 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2899 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2900 #693195.)
2901
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002902- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2903 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002904
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002905- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002906 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002907 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2908 interpreter executions, would fail.
2909
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002910- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002911 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002912 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002913
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002914Extension modules
2915-----------------
2916
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002917- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2918 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2919 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2920 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2921
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002922- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2923 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2924
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002925- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2926 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2927 and Greg Chapman.)
2928
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002929- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2930 recursively.
2931
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002932- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002933 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2934 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2935 leaks.
2936
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002937- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2938
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002939- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2940 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2941 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2942 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2943 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2944 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2945 #705836.
2946
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002947- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002948 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2949
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002950- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2951 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2952 See SF bug #692416.
2953
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002954- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2955 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2956
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002957- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2958 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2959 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002960
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002961- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002962 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2963 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2964
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002965- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2966 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2967 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2968 timeouts to work properly.
2969
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002970Library
2971-------
2972
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002973- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2974 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2975 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2976 future release.
2977
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002978- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2979 for querying platform dependent features.
2980
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002981- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002982
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002983- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2984 pickle protocol versions.
2985
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002986- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2987 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2988 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2989
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002990- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2991
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002992- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2993 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2994 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2995 modules.
2996
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002997- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2998 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2999 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3000
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003001- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3002 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3003
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003004- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3005 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3006 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3007
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003008- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003009 MS Office extensions.
3010
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003011- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3012 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3013
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003014- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3015 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3016
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003017- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3018 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3019 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3020 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3021 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3022 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3023
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003024- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3025 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3026 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003027
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003028- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3029 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3030 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3031
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003032- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3033
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003034- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3035 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3036 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3037
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003038Tools/Demos
3039-----------
3040
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003041- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3042 See the module docstring for details.
3043
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003044Build
3045-----
3046
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003047- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3048 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003049
3050C API
3051-----
3052
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003053- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3054
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003055- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3056 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3057 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3058
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003059- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3060 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003061
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003062 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3063 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3064 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003065
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003066- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003067 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3068
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003069- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3070 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3071 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003072
3073New platforms
3074-------------
3075
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003076None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003077
3078Tests
3079-----
3080
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003081- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3082 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003083
3084Windows
3085-------
3086
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003087- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3088 function.
3089
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003090- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3091 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003092
3093Mac
3094---
3095
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003096- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3097 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003098
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003099- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3100 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003101
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003102- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3103 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3104 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003105
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003106- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003107 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3108 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003109
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003110- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3111 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003112
3113
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003114What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3115=================================
3116
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003117*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003118
3119Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003120-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003121
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003122- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3123 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3124 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3125
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003126- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3127 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3128 (SF patch #664376.)
3129
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003130- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3131 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3132 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3133 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3134 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3135 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003136 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003137
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003138- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3139 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3140 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3141 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003142 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003143
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003144- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3145 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3146 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3147 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3148 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3149 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3150 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3151 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3152 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3153 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3154 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3155
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003156- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3157 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3158 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3159 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3160 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3161 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3162
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003163- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3164 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3165
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003166- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3167 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3168 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3169 case.)
3170
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003171- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3172 passed as unicode strings.
3173
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003174- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3175 See SF bug #683467.
3176
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003177- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3178 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3179
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003180- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3181
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003182- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3183
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003184- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3185 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3186 arguments.
3187
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003188- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3189 See SF bug #667147.
3190
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003191- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003192 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003193 See SF bug #676155.
3194
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003195- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003196 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003197 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3198 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3199 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3200 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3201 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3202 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003203
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003204Extension modules
3205-----------------
3206
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003207- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3208 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3209 tp_as_number pointer.
3210
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003211- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3212 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3213 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3214 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3215 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3216
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003217- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3218
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003219- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3220
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003221- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003222 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003223 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3224 patch #678531.)
3225
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003226- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3227 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3228
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003229- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3230 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3231
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003232- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3233
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003234- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3235 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3236 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3237
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003238- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3239
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003240- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3241 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3242
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003243- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003244
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003245- datetime changes:
3246
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003247 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3248
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003249 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3250 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3251 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3252 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3253 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3254 now.
3255
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003256 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003257 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3258 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003259
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003260 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003261 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003262 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3263 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3264 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3265 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003266
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003267 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3268 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3269 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003270 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3271
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003272 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3273 by a later example coded by Guido.
3274
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003275 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003276 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3277 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3278 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003279 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3280 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3281
3282 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3283 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3284 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3285 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3286 tzinfo subclass instance.
3287
3288 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3289 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3290 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3291 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3292 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3293 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3294 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3295 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003296
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003297 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3298 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3299 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3300 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3301 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003302 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3303
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003304 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003305
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003306 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3307 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3308 as a naive datetime object.
3309
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003310 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3311 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3312 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3313
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003314 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3315 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3316 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3317 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3318 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3319 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3320 comparison.
3321
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003322 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3323 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3324 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3325 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003326 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003327
3328 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003329
3330 and ::
3331
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003332 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3333
3334 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3335 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3336 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3337 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3338
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003339 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3340 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3341 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3342 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3343 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3344
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003345 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3346 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003347 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3348 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003349
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003350Library
3351-------
3352
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003353- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3354 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3355
3356- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3357 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3358 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3359 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3360 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3361 See PEP 307 for details.
3362
3363- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3364 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3365
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003366- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3367 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003368 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003369 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3370 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003371 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003372
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003373- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3374 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3375
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003376- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3377 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3378 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3379
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003380- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3381
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003382- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3383 exception.
3384
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003385- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3386 class.
3387
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003388- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3389 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3390 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3391
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003392- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3393 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3394
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003395- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003396 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3397 See SF bug #659228.
3398
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003399- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3400 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3401 See SF patch #651082.
3402
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003403- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003404
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003405- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3406 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3407
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003408- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003409 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003410
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003411- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3412 DOS paths from other platforms.
3413
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003414Tools/Demos
3415-----------
3416
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003417- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3418 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3419 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3420 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3421 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3422 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3423 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3424 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3425 example:
3426
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003427 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3428 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003429
3430 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3431
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003432
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003433Build
3434-----
3435
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003436- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3437 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3438 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003439 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3440
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003441 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3442
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003443- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3444 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3445 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3446 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3447 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3448 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3449 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3450 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3451 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3452
3453- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3454 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3455 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3456 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3457
3458- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3459 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3460
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003461C API
3462-----
3463
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003464- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3465 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003466
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003467- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3468 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3469 tp_as_number pointer.
3470
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003471- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3472 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3473 (SF #681367)
3474
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003475- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3476 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3477 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3478 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003479
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003480Tests
3481-----
3482
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003483- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003484 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3485 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3486 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3487 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3488 pydoc.)
3489
3490- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3491
3492- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003493
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003494Windows
3495-------
3496
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003497- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3498 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3499 time).
3500
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003501- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3502 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3503
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003504- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3505 release without strong cryptography.
3506
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003507- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003508 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003509
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003510- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3511 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3512
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003513Mac
3514---
3515
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003516- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3517 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003518
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003519- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3520 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3521 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003522
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003523- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3524 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003525
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003526- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3527 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3528 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3529 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003530
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003531- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003532 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3533 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3534 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003535
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003536
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003537What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003538=================================
3539
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003540*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003541
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003542Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003543--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003544
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003545- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3546
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003547- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3548 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003549 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003550 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003551 a different meaning than before.
3552
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003553- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003554 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003555 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003556
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003557- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003558 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003559 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003560
3561- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3562 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3563 and deallocation.
3564
3565- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3566 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3567
3568- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3569 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3570 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3571 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3572 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3573
3574- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3575 now detected by the garbage collector.
3576
3577- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3578 [SF bug 519621]
3579
3580- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3581 identifier.
3582
3583- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3584 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3585 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3586 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3587 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3588 [SF bug 563060]
3589
3590- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3591 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3592 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3593 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3594 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3595
3596- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3597 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3598 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3599
3600- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3601
3602- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3603 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3604 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3605 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3606 state of the slots would be lost.)
3607
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003608Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003609-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003610
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003611- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003612 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3613 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3614 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3615 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003616 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3617 Jython 2.1.
3618
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003619- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003620 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003621 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3622 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3623 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3624 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3625 these, see PEP 302.
3626
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003627- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3628 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3629 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3630
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003631- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3632 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3633 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3634
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003635- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3636 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3637 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3638
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003639- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3640 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3641 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3642 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3643 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3644 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3645 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3646 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3647 releases or implementations.
3648
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003649- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003650 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3651 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003652
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003653- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3654 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3655
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003656- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3657 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3658 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3659
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003660- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3661 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3662
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003663- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3664 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003665 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3666 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003667
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003668- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3669 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3670 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3671 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3672 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3673
3674 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3675 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3676 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3677 pattern.
3678
3679 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3680 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3681 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3682 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3683
3684 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3685 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3686 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3687 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3688 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3689 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3690
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003691- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3692 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3693 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3694 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3695 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3696 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3697 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3698 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003699
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003700- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3701 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3702 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3703 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3704 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003705 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3706 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3707 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3708 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3709 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3710 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3711 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003712
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003713- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3714 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3715
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003716- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3717 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3718 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3719 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3720 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3721 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3722 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3723 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3724 to Zack Weinberg!
3725
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003726- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3727 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3728 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3729 type. This has been fixed now.
3730
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003731- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3732 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3733 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3734
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003735- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3736 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3737 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3738 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3739 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3740 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3741 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3742 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003743 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003744
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003745- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3746 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3747 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003748
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003749- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3750 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3751 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3752 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3753 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3754 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3755 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3756 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003757 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003758 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3759 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3760
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003761- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3762 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3763 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3764 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3765 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3766 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3767 this.)
3768
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003769- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3770 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003771 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003772 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003773 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3774 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003775 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3776 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003777
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003778- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3779 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3780 currently running.
3781
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003782- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3783 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3784 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3785 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3786
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003787- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3788 as directory names.
3789
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003790- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3791 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3792
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003793- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3794 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3795
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003796- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003797 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3798 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003799
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003800- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3801 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3802 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3803 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3804 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3805
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003806- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3807 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3808 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3809 removed.
3810
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003811- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3812 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3813 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3814
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003815- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3816 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3817 to __debug__.
3818
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003819- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3820 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3821 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3822
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003823- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3824 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3825 deprecated now.
3826
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003827- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3828 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3829 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003830
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003831- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3832 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3833 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3834 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3835 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003836
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003837- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3838 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3839
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003840- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3841 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3842 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003843 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003844 is backward compatible.
3845
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003846- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3847 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3848 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3849 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3850 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3851
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003852- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3853 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3854 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3855 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3856 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3857 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003858
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003859- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3860 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3861
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003862- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3863 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3864
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003865- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3866 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3867 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3868 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3869 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3870
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003871- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3872 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3873 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3874
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003875- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003876 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3877
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003878- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3879 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3880 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003881
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003882- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3883 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3884
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003885- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3886 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3887 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3888
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003889- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3890
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003891Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003892-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003893
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003894- Added three operators to the operator module:
3895 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3896 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3897 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3898
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003899- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3900
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003901- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3902 archives.
3903
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003904- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3905 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3906 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3907
3908 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3909
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003910- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3911 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3912 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003913 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003914
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003915- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3916 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3917 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3918 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003919 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3920 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3921 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3922 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003923
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003924- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3925 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003926
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003927- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3928
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003929- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3930 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3931
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003932- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3933 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3934 supported.
3935
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003936- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3937
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003938- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3939 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003940
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003941- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3942 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3943
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003944- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3945
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003946- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3947 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3948
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003949- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3950 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3951 functions but callable type objects.
3952
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003953- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003954 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003955 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003956
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003957- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3958 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003959
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003960- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3961 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003962
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003963- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3964 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3965 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3966 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3967
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003968- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3969 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003970
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003971- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3972 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3973 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3974 and __imul__.
3975
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003976- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003977 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3978 is called.
3979
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003980- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3981 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3982 interpreter was compiled.
3983
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003984- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3985 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3986 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003987 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003988 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3989 1, not 2.
3990
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003991- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3992 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3993 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3994 limit.
3995
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003996- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3997 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3998 bug #623464.
3999
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004000- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4001 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4002 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4003 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4004
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004005Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004006-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004007
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004008- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4009
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004010- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4011 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4012 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4013 with Python 2.3a2.
4014
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004015- os.path exposes getctime.
4016
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004017- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004018 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004019 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004020 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004021 unit tests of floating point results.
4022
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004023- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4024 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4025 has been increased.
4026
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004027- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4028 executed.
4029
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004030- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4031 postinstallation script.
4032
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004033- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4034 test the current module.
4035
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004036- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004037 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4038 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4039 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4040 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4041
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004042- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004043 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004044 Ward's Optik package.
4045
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004046- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4047 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4048 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4049 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4050
4051- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4052 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004053 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004054
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004055- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4056 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4057 shelf are binary pickles.
4058
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004059- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4060 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4061
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004062- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4063 modules are iterators now.
4064
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004065- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4066 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4067 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4068 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4069 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4070 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004071
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004072- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4073 with their entity value.
4074
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004075- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4076
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004077- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4078 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004079
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004080- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4081 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004082 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004083
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004084- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4085 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4086 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4087 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4088 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4089 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4090 main():
4091
4092 import locale
4093 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4094
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004095- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4096 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4097
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004098- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4099 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4100 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4101 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4102 to the new standard.
4103
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004104- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4105 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4106 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4107 an extension to the database.
4108
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004109- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4110 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4111 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4112 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004113 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004114
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004115- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004116 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004117
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004118- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4119 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4120 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4121 bounded integers.
4122
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004123- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4124 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4125 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4126 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4127 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4128 in existence.
4129
4130 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4131 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4132 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4133 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4134 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4135 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4136
4137 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4138 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4139 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4140 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4141
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004142- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4143 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4144 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4145
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004146- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4147
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004148- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4149 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4150 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4151 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4152
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004153- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4154 argument.
4155
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004156- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4157 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4158 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4159 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4160 [SF patch 560794].
4161
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004162- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4163 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4164 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004165 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4166 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4167 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004168
4169- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4170 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004171
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004172- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4173 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4174 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4175 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004176
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004177- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4178 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4179 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4180 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4181 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4182
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004183- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004184
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004185- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4186
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004187- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4188 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4189 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4190 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4191 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4192 identical to None.
4193
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004194- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4195 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4196 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4197 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4198 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4199 results now.
4200
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004201- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4202 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4203
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004204- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4205 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4206 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4207 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4208 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4209 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4210 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4211 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4212
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004213- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4214
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004215- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4216 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4217
4218- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4219 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4220 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4221 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4222 and other systems.
4223
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004224- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4225 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4226 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4227 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 +00004228 work well with these.
4229
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004230- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4231
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004232- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004233 connections.
4234
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004235- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4236 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4237 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4238
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004239- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4240 sets
4241
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004242- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4243 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4244 name.
4245
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004246- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4247 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4248 passed in.
4249
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004250- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004251 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004252 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4253 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004254
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004255- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4256
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004257- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4258
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004259- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4260 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4261 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4262
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004263- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4264 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4265 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4266 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004267 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004268
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004269- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004270 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004271 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004272
4273- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4274 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4275 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4276
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004277- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004278 the value of its expression argument.
4279
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004280- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4281 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4282 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4283
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004284- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4285 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4286 skipstone browser was included.
4287
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004288- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4289 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4290
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004291Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004293
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004294- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4295 names in addition to accepting file names.
4296
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004297- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4298 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4299 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4300 still used and useful.)
4301
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004302- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4303 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4304 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4305 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004306
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004307- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4308 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4309 the generated binary.
4310
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004311Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004312-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004313
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004314- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4315
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004316- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4317 except in the hands of experts.
4318
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004319- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004320 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4321 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4322 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004323
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004324- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4325 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4326 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4327 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4328 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4329 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4330 builds.
4331
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004332- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4333 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4334 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4335 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4336 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4337 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4338 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4339 new type.
4340
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004341- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004342
4343 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4344 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4345 positive infinities.
4346
4347 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4348 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4349 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4350 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4351 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4352 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4353 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4354
4355 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4356
4357 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4358
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004359- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4360 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4361 size of the executable.
4362
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004363- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4364 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4365 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4366 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004367
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004368- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4369
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004370- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4371 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4372 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004373
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004374- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4375 well as Unix.
4376
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004377- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4378 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4379 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4380 modules in the README file for details.
4381
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004382C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004383-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004384
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004385- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4386 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004387 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004388 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004389 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004390
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004391- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4392 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4393 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4394 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4395 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4396 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004397 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004398 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4399 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4400 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4401 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4402 aligned.)
4403
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004404- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4405 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4406 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4407
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004408- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4409 level.
4410
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004411- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4412 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4413 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4414 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4415 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4416
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004417- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4418 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4419 code.
4420
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004421- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4422 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4423 adjusting for negative indices.
4424
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004425- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4426 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4427 object.
4428
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004429- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4430 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4431 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4432
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004433- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4434 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004435
4436- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4437
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004438- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4439 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4440 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4441 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4442
4443- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4444
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004445- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004446
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004447- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004448 without going through the buffer API.
4449
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004450- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004451
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004452- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4453 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4454 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4455 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4456
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004457- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4458 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4459
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004460- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004461 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4462
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004463New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004464-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004465
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004466- OpenVMS is now supported.
4467
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004468- AtheOS is now supported.
4469
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004470- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4471
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004472- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4473
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004474Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004475-----
4476
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004477- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4478 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4479 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004480
4481Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004482-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004483
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004484- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4485 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4486 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4487 bugs.
4488 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004489 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004490 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4491 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004492 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004493
4494- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004495 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004496
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004497- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4498 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4499
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004500- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4501 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004502 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004503 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4504
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004505- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4506 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4507 use files" uninstall option).
4508
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004509- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4510
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004511- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4512 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4513
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004514- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4515 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4516 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4517
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004518- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4519 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4520 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4521 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4522 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004523 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4524 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4525 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004526
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004527- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004528 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004529 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4530 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4531 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4532 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4533 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4534 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4535 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4536 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4537 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4538 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4539 work around.
4540
4541- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4542 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4543 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4544 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4545 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4546 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4547 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4548 specified with O_CREAT too).
4549
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004550Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004551----
4552
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004553- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004554
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004555- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4556 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4557 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4558
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004559- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4560 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4561 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4562
4563- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4564 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4565 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4566 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4567 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4568 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4569 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4570 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004571
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004572- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4573 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4574 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004575
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004576- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4577 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4578 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4579 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4580 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004581
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004582- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4583 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4584 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004585
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004586- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4587 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004588
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004589- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4590 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4591 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4592 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4593 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004594
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004595- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4596 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4597 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4598
4599- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4600 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4601 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004602
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004603- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4604 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4605 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4606 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004607 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004608
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004609- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4610 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004611
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004612- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4613 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004614
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004615- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004616 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004617 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4618 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004619
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004620
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004621What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004622===============================
4623
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004624*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4625
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004626Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004627--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004628
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004629- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4630 with a custom metaclass.
4631
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004632Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004633-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004634
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004635- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4636 are proxies.
4637
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004638Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004639-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004640
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004641- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4642 very short strings.
4643
4644- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4645 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4646 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4647 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4648 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4649
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004650Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004651-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004652
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004653- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4654 close or delete time).
4655
4656- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4657 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4658
4659- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4660
4661- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004662 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004663
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004664Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004665-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004666
4667Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004668-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004669
4670C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004671-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004672
4673New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004674-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004675
4676Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004677-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004678
4679Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004680-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004681
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004682- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4683
4684- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4685 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4686
4687- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4688 deleted at process exit time.
4689
4690- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4691 in backslash.
4692
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004693Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004694----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004695
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004696- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4697 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4698 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4699
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004700
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004701What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004702===========================
4703
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004704*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4705
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004706Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004707--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004708
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004709- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4710 been extensively updated. See
4711
4712 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4713
4714 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4715
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004716- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4717 deleted!
4718
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004719- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4720 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4721 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4722 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4723 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4724
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004725- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4726
4727 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4728 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4729
4730 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4731 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4732 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4733 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4734 supported anyway.
4735
4736 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4737 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4738
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004739- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4740 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4741 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4742 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4743 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004744
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004745- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4746 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4747 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4748
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004749Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004750-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004751
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004752- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4753 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4754 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4755 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4756 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4757 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004758 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4759 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4760 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4761 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004762
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004763- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4764 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4765 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4766
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004767Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004768-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004769
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004770- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4771
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004772Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004773-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004774
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004775- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4776 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4777 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4778 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4779 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4780 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4781
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004782- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4783
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004784- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4785
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004786- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4787
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004788- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4789 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4790 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4791
4792- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4793
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004794Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004795-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004796
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004797- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4798 off a search on Google.
4799
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004800Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004801-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004802
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004803- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4804 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4805 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4806 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4807 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4808 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4809 other platforms should do likewise.
4810
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004811- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4812 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4813 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4814
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004815C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004816-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004817
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004818- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4819 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4820 producing key-value pairs.
4821
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004822- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004823 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004824 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4825 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4826 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4827 previously went unchallenged.
4828
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004829New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004830-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004831
4832Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004833-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004834
4835Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004836-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004837
4838Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004839----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004840
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004841- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4842 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004843
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004844- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4845 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4846 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4847 home.
4848
4849
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004850What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004851===========================
4852
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004853*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4854
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004855Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004856--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004857
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004858- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4859 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004860
4861 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004862 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004863
4864 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4865 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004866 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004867 This needs to be documented.
4868
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004869- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4870 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4871
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004872- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4873 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4874 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4875
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004876- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4877 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4878
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004879- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4880 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4881 class forbids it).
4882
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004883- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4884 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4885 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4886
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004887- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4888
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004889Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004890-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004891
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004892- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4893 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004894 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004895
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004896- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4897 (like 1 + '').
4898
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004899Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004900-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004901
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004902- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4903 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4904 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4905 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004906 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004907 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4908
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004909- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4910 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4911 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4912 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4913
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004914- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4915 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004916 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4917 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4918 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004919
4920- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4921 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004922
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004923- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4924 bytes on its input.
4925
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004926Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004927-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004928
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004929- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004930 convenience function.
4931
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004932- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4933 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4934 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004935 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4936 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4937 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4938 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4939 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4940 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004941
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004942- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4943 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4944 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4945 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4946
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004947- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4948 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4949 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4950
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004951- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4952 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4953 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4954 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4955
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004956- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4957 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004958 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004959 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4960 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4961 new -l and -e options.
4962
4963- statcache is now deprecated.
4964
4965- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4966 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004967 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004968 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4969 time properly taken into account.
4970
4971- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4972 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4973 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4974 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4975
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004976Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004977-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004978
4979Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004980-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004981
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004982- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4983 is built with libdb3 if available.
4984
4985- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4986
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004987C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004988-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004989
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004990- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4991 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4992 PySequence_Size().
4993
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004994- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4995
4996- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4997 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4998 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4999
5000- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5001 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5002
5003- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5004 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5005
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005006New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005007-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005008
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005009- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5010 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5011
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005012- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5013 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5014
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005015- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5016
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005017Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005018-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005019
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005020- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5021 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5022
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005023Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005024-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005025
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005026Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005027----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005028
5029- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5030 removed completely in the next release.
5031
5032- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5033 OSX.
5034
5035- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5036 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5037
5038- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5039
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005040
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005041What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005042===========================
5043
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005044*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5045
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005046Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005047--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005048
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005049- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005050 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005051 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005052 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5053 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005054 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5055 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005056 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5057 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005058
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005059- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5060 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5061
5062- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5063 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5064
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005065Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005066-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005067
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005068- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5069 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5070 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5071 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5072 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5073 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5074 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5075 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5076
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005077- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5078 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5079 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5080 example).
5081
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005082- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005083 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005084 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005085 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005086
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005087- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5088 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5089 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005090 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005091
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005092- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5093 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5094 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5095 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5096 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5097 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5098
5099 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5100
5101 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5102
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005103Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005104-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005105
5106- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5107
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005108- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5109
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005110- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5111 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005112
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005113- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5114 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5115 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5116 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5117 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5118 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005119 attributes.
5120
5121- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5122 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5123 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005124
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005125- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5126 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5127 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005128
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005129- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5130 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5131 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005132 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5133 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5134
5135- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5136 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005137
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005138Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005139-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005140
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005141- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5142 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5143
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005144- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5145 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5146 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5147 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5148
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005149- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5150 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5151 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5152 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5153
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005154 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5155 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5156 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5157 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5158 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5159 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5160 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5161 without losing information).
5162
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005163- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005164 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5165 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5166 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5167 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5168 module).
5169
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005170 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005171 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5172 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5173 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5174 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005175
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005176- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005177 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5178 encoding.
5179
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005180- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5181 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5182
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005183- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005184 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5185
5186- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5187 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5188 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5189 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5190
5191- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5192
5193- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5194 ON, and OFF.
5195
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005196- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5197 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5198
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005199Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005200-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005201
5202- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5203 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5204 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005205
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005206- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5207 been added: -X and -E.
5208
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005209Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005210-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005211
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005212- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5213 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5214
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005215C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005216-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005217
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005218- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5219 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5220 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5221 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5222 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5223
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005224- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5225 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5226 as long) arguments.
5227
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005228- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5229 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5230 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5231 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5232 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5233 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5234
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005235- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5236 input.
5237
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005238New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005239-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005240
5241Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005242-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005243
5244Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005245-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005246
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005247- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5248 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5249 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5250
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005251- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5252 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5253 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005254 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005255
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005256 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5257 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5258 import signal
5259 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005260
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005261 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005262 while 1:
5263 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005264 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005265 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5266 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5267 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5268 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005269
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005270
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005271What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5272===========================
5273
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005274*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5275
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005276Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005277--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005278
5279- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5280 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5281 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5282
5283- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5284 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5285 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5286 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5287 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5288 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5289 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005290
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005291- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005292 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005293 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5294 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5295 associate a docstring with a property.
5296
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005297- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5298 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5299 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5300 other built-in object types.
5301
5302- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5303 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5304 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5305 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5306 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5307
5308- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5309 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5310
5311- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5312 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005313 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005314 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5315 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5316 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5317 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5318 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5319
5320- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5321 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5322 class.
5323
5324- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5325 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5326 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5327 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5328
5329- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5330 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5331 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5332 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5333
5334- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5335 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5336
5337- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5338 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5339 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5340 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5341 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005342 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005343 with the same value as s.
5344
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005345- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5346
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005347Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005348----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005349
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005350- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5351
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005352- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5353 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5354 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5355 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5356 objects.
5357
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005358- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5359 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005360 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5361 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5362
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005363- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5364 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5365 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5366
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005367Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005368-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005369
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005370- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5371 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5372 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5373 by the instances.
5374
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005375- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5376 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5377 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5378
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005379- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5380 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5381 before the entire comparison is complete.
5382
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005383- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5384 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5385 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5386
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005387- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5388 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5389 getwriter().
5390
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005391- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5392 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5393
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005394- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005395 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5396 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5397
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005398- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5399 iterable object.
5400
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005401- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5402 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005403
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005404- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5405 authentication.
5406
5407- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5408 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005409
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005410- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005411 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5412 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5413 a sample driver.)
5414
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005415Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005416-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005417
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005418- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5419 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5420 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5421 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5422 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5423 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5424 kernel has large file support.
5425
5426- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5427 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5428 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5429 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5430 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5431
5432- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5433 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5434 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5435
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005436C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005437-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005438
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005439- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5440 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5441
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005442New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005443-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005444
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005445- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5446 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5447
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005448Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005449-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005450
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005451- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5452 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5453 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5454 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5455 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5456
5457- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5458 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5459 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5460 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5461
5462- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5463 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5464
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005465Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005466-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005467
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005468- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005469 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5470 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005471
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005472
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005473What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5474===========================
5475
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005476*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5477
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005478Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005479----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005480
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005481- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5482 big to represent as a C double.
5483
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005484- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5485 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5486 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5487 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5488 restriction).
5489
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005490- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5491 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5492 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5493 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5494 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5495
5496 >>> dir([])
5497 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5498 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5499 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5500 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5501 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5502 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5503 'reverse', 'sort']
5504
5505 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5506
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005507- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005508 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5509 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5510 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5511 OverflowError exception.
5512
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005513- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005514 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005515 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5516 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5517 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5518 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5519 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005520 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005521 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5522 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5523
5524 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5525 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5526 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5527 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005528
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005529- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005530 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5531 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5532 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5533 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5534 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5535 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5536 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5537 once it is created.
5538
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005539- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5540 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5541 (key, value) pairs.
5542
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005543- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005544 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5545 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5546
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005547- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5548 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5549 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5550 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5551 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005552
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005553- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005554 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5555 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5556
5557 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5558
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005559- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005560 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5561
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005562Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005563-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005564
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005565- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005566 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5567 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005568
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005569- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5570 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5571 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5572 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5573 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5574 in this area anymore).
5575
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005576- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5577 threading.Timer.
5578
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005579- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5580 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5581
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005582- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005583 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5584
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005585- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005586 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5587 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5588 converted to Python longs.
5589
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005590- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005591 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5592
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005593- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5594 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5595 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5596
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005597Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005598-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005599
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005600- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5601 division operators as per PEP 238.
5602
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005603Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005604-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005605
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005606- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5607 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5608 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5609 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5610
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005611C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005612-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005613
5614- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005615
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005616- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5617 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005618 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005619
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005620 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5621 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005622 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005623 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005624
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005625- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005626 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5627 module:
5628
5629 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005630
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005631 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5632 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005633
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005634 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5635 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005636
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005637 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5638
5639 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5640
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005641- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005642 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5643 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5644 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005645
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005646New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005647-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005648
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005649- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5650 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5651 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5652 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5653 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005654
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005655Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005656-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005657
5658Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005659-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005660
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005661- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5662 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5663 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5664 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005665 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5666 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5667 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5668 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5669 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005670
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005671- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005672 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5673
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005674
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005675What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5676===========================
5677
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005678*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5679
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005680Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005681-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005682
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005683- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5684 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5685
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005686- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5687 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5688 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005689
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005690- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5691 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5692 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5693 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005694
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005695- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5696
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005697- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005698
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005699Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005700-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005701
5702- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005703 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005704 the module docstring for details.
5705
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005706Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005707-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005708
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005709- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005710 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5711 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5712 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005713
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005714- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5715 Nick Mathewson.
5716
5717Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005718----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005719
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005720- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5721 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5722 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5723 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5724 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5725 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5726 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5727 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5728
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005729- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5730 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5731 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5732 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5733
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005734- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5735 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5736 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5737 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5738 come a long way).
5739
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005740- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5741 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5742 write filters for these warnings).
5743
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005744- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5745 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5746 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5747 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5748 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5749
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005750- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5751 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5752 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5753 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5754 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5755 older distribution.
5756
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005757Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005758-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005759
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005760- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5761 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005762 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005763
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005764- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5765 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5766 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5767
5768- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5769
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005770- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5771
5772- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5773
5774- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5775
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005776- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005777
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005778- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5779
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005780New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005781-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005782
5783C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005784-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005785
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005786- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5787 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5788 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5789 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5790 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5791 against buffer overruns.
5792
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005793- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005794 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5795 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005796 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5797 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5798 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5799
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005800- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5801 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5802 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5803 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5804 deprecated.
5805
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005806Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005807-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005808
5809- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5810 relevant is found.
5811
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005812
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005813What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005814===========================
5815
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005816*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5817
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005818Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005819----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005820
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005821- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5822 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5823 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5824 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5825 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5826 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5827 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5828 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005829 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005830 repaired.
5831
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005832- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005833 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005834 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5835 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5836 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5837 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5838 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5839 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5840 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5841 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5842
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005843- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5844 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5845 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5846 leading BMO character).
5847
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005848- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5849 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5850 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5851
5852 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5853 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5854 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005855
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005856 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5857 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5858 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5859 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5860 for various simple to use conversions.
5861
5862 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5863 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5864
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005865 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5866 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5867 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5868 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5869 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5870 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5871 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5872 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5873 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5874 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5875 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5876 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5877 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5878 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5879 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005880
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005881- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5882 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5883 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005884 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005885 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005886
5887 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005888 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5889 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5890 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5891 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5892 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005893 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5894 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005895
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005896 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5897 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5898 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005899 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005900
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005901- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5902 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5903 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5904 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5905 floating arithmetic,
5906
5907 x = 9007199254740992.0
5908 print long(x)
5909
5910 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5911 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5912 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5913 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5914 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5915 functions are of good quality).
5916
5917 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5918 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5919 algorithms to break.
5920
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005921- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5922 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5923 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5924 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5925 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5926 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5927 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5928 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5929 order.
5930
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005931- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5932 operation along the most common code paths.
5933
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005934- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5935 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5936
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005937- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5938 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5939 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5940 {}.update(UserDict())
5941
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005942- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5943 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5944 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5945 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5946 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5947 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5948 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5949 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5950
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005951- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005952 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005953
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005954 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005955 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5956 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005957 join() method of strings
5958 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005959 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5960 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005961 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005962 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005963
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005964- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5965 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5966
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005967- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5968 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5969
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005970- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5971 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5972 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5973 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5974
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005975- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5976 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005977 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005978 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5979 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005980
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005981- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5982
5983
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005984Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005985-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005986
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005987- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005988 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005989 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5990 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5991
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005992- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5993 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5994
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005995- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5996 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5997 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5998 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5999
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006000- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6001 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6002 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6003
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006004- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6005
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006006- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6007
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006008- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6009 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6010 that are still imported into string.py).
6011
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006012- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6013
6014- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6015 Now it does.
6016
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006017- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6018
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006019- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6020 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6021 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6022 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6023 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006024 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6025 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006026
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006027- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6028 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6029 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6030 'help(object)'.
6031
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006032Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006033-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006034
6035- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006036 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006037 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6038 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6039
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006040- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006041 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6042 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006043
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006044C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006045-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006046
6047- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6048 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006049
6050----
6051
6052**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**