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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
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000219- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
220
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000221- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
222
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000223- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
224 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
225 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
226
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000227- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
228 without prior setting of the userptr.
229
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000230- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
231
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000232- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
233
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000234- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
235 problem on AIX.
236
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000237- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
238
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000239- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
240
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000241- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
242
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000243- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
244 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
245
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000246- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
247
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000248- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
249 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
250
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000251- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
252
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000253- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
254 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
255
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000256- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
257 returns in cStringIO.c.
258
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000259- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
260 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
261
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000262- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
263
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000264- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
265
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000266- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
267 the file system encoding.
268
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000269- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
270 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000271
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000272- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
273
274- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000275 line without newlines.
276
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000277- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
278 on Windows.
279
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000280- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000281 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
282
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000283- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
284 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
285 for large or negative values.
286
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000287- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000288 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000289
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000290- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
291
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000292- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
293 if available on the platform.
294
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000295- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
296 available on the platform.
297
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000298- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
299 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
300
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000301- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
302
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000303- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
304 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
305 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
306
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000307- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
308
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000309- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
310 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
311
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000312- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000313 file size.
314
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000315- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
316
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000317- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
318 {remove_history,replace_history}
319
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000320- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
321 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000322
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000323- stat_float_times is now True.
324
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000325- array.array objects are now picklable.
326
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000327- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
328 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
329
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000330- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
331 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
332 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
333
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000334- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
335 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000336
337Library
338-------
339
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000340- Bug #1407902: Added support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
341
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000342- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
343
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000344- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000345 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000346
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000347- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
348 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000349
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000350- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
351
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000352- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
353
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000354- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
355 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
356 LoadError subclasses IOError.
357
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000358- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000359 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
360 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
361 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
362 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
363
364 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
365 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
366 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
367 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
368 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000369
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000370- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
371 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
372 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
373
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000374- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
375
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000376- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
377
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000378- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
379 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
380 illegal argument)
381
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000382- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
383 is an error in the format string.
384
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000385- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
386
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000387- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000388 "parent" argument.
389
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000390- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
391 for padding.
392
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000393- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
394 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
395
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000396- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
397 to get the correct encoding.
398
399- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
400 languages.
401
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000402- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
403
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000404- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
405
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000406- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
407
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000408- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
409 functionality.
410
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000411- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
412
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000413- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
414 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
415
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000416- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
417 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
418 match the Content-Length header.
419
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000420- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
421
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000422- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
423 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000424 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000425
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000426- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
427
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000428- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
429
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000430- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
431 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
432
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000433- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
434 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
435 Tkdnd.
436
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000437- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
438 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
439
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000440- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
441 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
442
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000443- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000444 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
445
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000446- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
447 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
448
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000449- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
450 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
451
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000452- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000453 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000454
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000455- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
456
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000457- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
458 error messages.
459
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000460- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
461
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000462- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
463 Bug #1224621.
464
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000465- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
466 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
467 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
468 terminates by raising StopIteration.
469
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000470- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
471
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000472- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
473 component of the path.
474
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000475- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
476 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
477 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
478 class at all.
479
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000480- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
481 files to PyPI.
482
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000483- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
484 them to PyPI.
485
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000486- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
487 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
488 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
489 work as expected.
490
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000491- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
492 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
493
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000494- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000495 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
496
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000497- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
498
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000499- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
500 to build.
501
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000502- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
503 symbolic links on Windows.
504
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000505- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000506 profile.py if available.
507
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000508- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
509
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000510- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
511 in LWPCookieJar.
512
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000513- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
514
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000515- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
516
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000517- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
518
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000519- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
520
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000521- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
522
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000523- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
524
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000525- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
526
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000527- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
528
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000529- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
530 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
531 be exploited in various ways.
532
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000533- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000534 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
535
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000536- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
537 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
538
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000539- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000540 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
541
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000542- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
543
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000544- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
545
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000546- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
547
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000548- Enhancements to the csv module:
549
550 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000551 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000552 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000553 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
554 reporting.
555 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
556 dictates.
557 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000558 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000559 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000560 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
561 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000562 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
563 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000564 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000565 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
566 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
567 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
568 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
569 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
570 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
571 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
572 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
573 without first creating a dialect class.
574 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
575 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
576 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000577 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000578 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
579 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000580 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
581 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
582 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
583 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000584 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
585 This has been fixed.
586
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000587- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
588 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
589 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
590 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
591
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000592- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
593
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000594- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
595 (Bug #951915).
596
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000597- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
598 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
599 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000600 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000601
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000602- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
603
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000604- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
605 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
606
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000607- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
608
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000609- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
610
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000611- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
612
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000613- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
614
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000615- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
616
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000617- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
618 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
619 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
620
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000621- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000622 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000623
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000624- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
625 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
626 tokenizer with very long source lines.
627
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000628- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
629 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
630 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000631
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000632- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
633 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000634
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000635- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
636 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
637
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000638- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
639 correctly.
640
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000641- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
642 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
643 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
644 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
645 between two lines.
646
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000647- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
648 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
649 handlers.
650
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000651- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000652 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
653 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000654
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000655- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
656 considering it exactly like a '*'.
657
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000658- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
659 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000660
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000661- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
662
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000663Build
664-----
665
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000666- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
667
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000668- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
669 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
670
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000671- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
672
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000673- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
674 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
675
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000676- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
677 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
678
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000679- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
680 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
681 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000682 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000683
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000684- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
685 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
686 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
687
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000688- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
689
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000690- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
691 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
692
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000693- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
694 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
695 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
696 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
697 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
698 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
699 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
700 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
701
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000702- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
703 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
704 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
705 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
706
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000707C API
708-----
709
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000710- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
711
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000712- Removed PyRange_New().
713
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000714- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
715 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
716 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
717 mappings.
718
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000719
720Tests
721-----
722
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000723- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000724
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000725- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
726 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
727
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000728
729Documentation
730-------------
731
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000732- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
733
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000734- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
735 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
736
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000737- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
738
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000739- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
740
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000741- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
742
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000743- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
744
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000745- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
746
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000747- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
748
749- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
750
751- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
752
753- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
754
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000755- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
756 Closes bug #1166582.
757
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000758- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
759 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
760 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
761
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000762Mac
763---
764
765
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000766New platforms
767-------------
768
769- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
770
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000771
772Tools/Demos
773-----------
774
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000775- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
776 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
777 source files that need an encoding declaration.
778 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
779
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000780- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
781
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000782- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000783
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000784- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
785 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000786
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000787What's New in Python 2.4 final?
788===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000789
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000790*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000791
792Core and builtins
793-----------------
794
795- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
796 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
797 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
798
799
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000800What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
801==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000802
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000803*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000804
805Core and builtins
806-----------------
807
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000808- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
809 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
810 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
811
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000812
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000813Library
814-------
815
816- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
817 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
818 raised is re-raised.
819
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000820- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
821 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
822
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000823- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
824 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
825 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
826 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
827 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
828 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
829 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
830 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
831 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
832 by the slice are recomputed now.
833
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000834- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000835
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000836Build
837-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000838
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000839- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
840 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
841 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000842
843C API
844-----
845
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000846- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
847
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000848
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000849What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
850================================
851
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000852*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000853
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000854License
855-------
856
857The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
858is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
859changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
860Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
861intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
862durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
863the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
864License::
865
866 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
867
868says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
869to Python 2.1.1.
870
871The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
872License Version 2.
873
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000874Core and builtins
875-----------------
876
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000877- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
878 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
879 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
880 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
881 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
882 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
883 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000884 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000885 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
886 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
887
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000888- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000889
890Extension Modules
891-----------------
892
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000893- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
894 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
895 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
896 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000897
898Library
899-------
900
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000901- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
902 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
903 returned.
904
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000905- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
906
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000907- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
908 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
909
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000910- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
911
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000912- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
913 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000914
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000915- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
916
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000917- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
918
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000919- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000920 the source code is updated and reloaded.
921
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000922Build
923-----
924
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000925- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000926
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000927What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
928================================
929
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000930*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000931
932Core and builtins
933-----------------
934
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000935- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000936 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
937
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000938- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
939 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
940 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
941 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
942
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000943- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
944 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
945
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000946- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
947 constant.
948
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000949- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
950 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
951 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
952 large), and to anomalies such as
953 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
954 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
955 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
956 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000957
958Extension modules
959-----------------
960
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000961- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
962 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000963 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
964 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
965 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000966
967Library
968-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000969
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000970- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000971 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000972 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
973 --swig-cpp.
974
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000975- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
976 it is set.
977
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000978- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000979
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000980- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
981 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
982 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
983 Closes bug #1039270.
984
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000985- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000986
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000987 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000988 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
989 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
990 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
991 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
992 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
993 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
994 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
995 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
996 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
997 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
998 + Updates to documentation.
999
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001000- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1001 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1002 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1003 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1004
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001005- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001006
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001007- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1008 applications should use the getmember function.
1009
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001010- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1011
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001012- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1013 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1014 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1015 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1016 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1017 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1018 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1019 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1020 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1021
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001022- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1023 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001024 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001025
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001026- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1027 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1028 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1029 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1030 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1031 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1032 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1033 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001034
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001035- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1036 the new public features (of which there are many).
1037
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001038- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001039 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1040 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1041 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1042 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001043 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001044
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001045- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1046
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001047- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1048 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1049 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1050 options.
1051
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001052- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1053 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1054 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1055 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1056 conditions under which non-string values work.
1057
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001058Build
1059-----
1060
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001061- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1062 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1063 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1064
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001065- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1066 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1067 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1068 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1069 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001070
1071C API
1072-----
1073
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001074- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1075 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1076
1077- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1078
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001079- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1080 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1081 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1082 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1083 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1084 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1085 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1086 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1087 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1088
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001089- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1090
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001091- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1092 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1093 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001094
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001095Tests
1096-----
1097
1098- test__locale ported to unittest
1099
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001100Mac
1101---
1102
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001103- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1104 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1105 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001106
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001107Tools/Demos
1108-----------
1109
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001110- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1111 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1112 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1113 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1114 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001115
1116
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001117What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1118=================================
1119
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001120*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001121
1122Core and builtins
1123-----------------
1124
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001125- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001126 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1127
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001128- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1129 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1130 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1131 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1132 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1133 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1134 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1135 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001136 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1137 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1138 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1139 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1140 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001141
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001142- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1143 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1144 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1145 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1146 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1147
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001148- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1149
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001150- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1151 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1152
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001153- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1154 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1155 modified the list.
1156
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001157- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1158 functions is now writable.
1159
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001160- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1161 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1162 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1163 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1164
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001165- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1166 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1167 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1168 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1169 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001170
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001171- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1172 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1173
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001174Extension modules
1175-----------------
1176
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001177- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1178
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001179- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1180 data.
1181
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001182- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1183 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1184 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1185 supposed to have been truncated away.
1186
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001187- Added socket.socketpair().
1188
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001189- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1190 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1191
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001192- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001193 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1194
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001195Library
1196-------
1197
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001198- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001199 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001200
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001201- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1202 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1203
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001204- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1205 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1206
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001207- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1208
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001209- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1210 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001211
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001212- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1213 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1214
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001215- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1216
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001217- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1218
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001219- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1220
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001221- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1222 Percivall.
1223
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001224- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1225 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1226
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001227- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1228 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1229 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001230 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001231
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001232- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1233 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1234 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1235 and exponent.
1236
1237- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1238
1239- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001240 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001241 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1242
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001243- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1244 to the readline module.
1245
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001246- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001247 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1248 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001249
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001250- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1251 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1252 contains symlinks.
1253
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001254- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1255 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1256
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001257- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1258 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1259 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1260
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001261- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1262 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1263 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1264 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1265 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1266 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1267 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1268 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1269 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1270 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1271 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1272 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1273 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1274
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001275- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1276
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001277Tools/Demos
1278-----------
1279
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001280- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1281 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1282
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001283- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1284
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001285Build
1286-----
1287
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001288- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1289 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1290 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1291 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1292 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1293 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1294 plans to do so.
1295
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001296- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1297 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1298
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001299- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1300 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1301
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001302- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1303 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1304
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001305- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1306 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1307
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001308- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1309 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1310
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001311C API
1312-----
1313
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001314..
1315
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001316Documentation
1317-------------
1318
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001319- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1320 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1321
1322- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1323 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1324 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001325
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001326New platforms
1327-------------
1328
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001329- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1330
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001331Tests
1332-----
1333
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001334..
1335
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001336Windows
1337-------
1338
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001339- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1340 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1341 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1342 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1343 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1344 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1345 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1346 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1347 the problem.
1348
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001349Mac
1350---
1351
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001352..
1353
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001354
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001355What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1356=================================
1357
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001358*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001359
1360Core and builtins
1361-----------------
1362
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001363- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1364 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1365 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1366 sensitive code.
1367
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001368- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001369 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001370
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001371 @staticmethod
1372 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001373
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001374 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001375
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001376- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1377 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1378 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1379 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1380 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1381 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1382 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1383 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1384 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1385 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1386 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1387
1388 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1389 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1390 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1391 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1392 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1393 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1394 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1395
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001396- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1397 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1398
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001399- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001400 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001401
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001402- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001403 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001404 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1405
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001406- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001407 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1408 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1409
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001410- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1411 types that support garbage collection.
1412
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001413- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1414
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001415- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1416 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1417 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1418 Jython.
1419
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001420- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1421
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001422- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1423 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1424
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001425- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1426 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1427 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001428
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001429- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1430 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1431 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1432
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001433Extension modules
1434-----------------
1435
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001436- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1437
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001438Library
1439-------
1440
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001441- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1442 TIS-620
1443
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001444- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1445 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1446 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1447 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1448 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1449 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1450 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1451 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1452 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1453 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1454
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001455- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1456
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001457- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1458 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1459 same as when the argument is omitted).
1460 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1461
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001462- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1463
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001464- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1465 schemes are offered.
1466
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001467- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1468
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001469- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1470 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1471 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1472
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001473- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1474
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001475- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1476 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1477
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001478- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1479 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1480 when dummy_threading is being used.
1481
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001482- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1483 from a tarfile.
1484
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001485- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001486 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001487
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001488- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1489 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1490 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1491 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1492
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001493- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1494 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1495
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001496- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1497 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1498 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1499 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1500 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1501 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1502 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1503 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1504 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1505 by some other method in progress).
1506
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001507- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1508 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1509 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001510
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001511- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1512
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001513- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1514 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1515 AM Kuchling.
1516
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001517- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1518 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1519 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1520
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001521- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1522 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1523 instead of unsigned.
1524
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001525- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001526 no longer part of the public API.
1527
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001528- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1529 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1530 string methods of the same name).
1531
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001532- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001533 SF patch 945642.
1534
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001535- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1536
1537 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1538
1539 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1540 DocTestSuites.
1541
1542- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1543 that provide thread-local data.
1544
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001545- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1546 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1547
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001548- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1549
1550- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1551 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1552 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1553
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001554- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1555
1556 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1557 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1558 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001559
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001560 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1561 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1562 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1563 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1564
1565 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1566 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1567
1568 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1569 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1570 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1571 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1572
1573 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1574 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1575 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1576 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1577 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1578
1579 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1580 wrapping help output.
1581
1582 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1583 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1584 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001585
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001586C API
1587-----
1588
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001589- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1590 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1591 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1592 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1593 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1594 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1595 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1596 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1597 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1598 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1599 its visible semantics have not changed.
1600
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001601- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1602 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1603
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001604Documentation
1605-------------
1606
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001607- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001608
1609 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001610 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001611
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001612 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001613
1614 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1615
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001616- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001617
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001618Tests
1619-----
1620
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001621- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001622 platforms that use the Makefile.
1623
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001624- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1625 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1626 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1627
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001628
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001629What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1630=================================
1631
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001632*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001633
1634Core and builtins
1635-----------------
1636
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001637- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1638 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1639 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1640 objects now (one object instead of three).
1641
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001642- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1643 Windows DLLs.
1644
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001645- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1646 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001647
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001648- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1649 a new .pyc magic.
1650
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001651- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1652 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1653 be there.
1654
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001655- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1656 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1657 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1658
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001659- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1660 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1661 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1662
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001663- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1664
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001665- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1666 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1667 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001668
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001669- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1670 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1671
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001672- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1673
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001674- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001675 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001676
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001677- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1678
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001679- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1680
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001681- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1682 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1683
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001684- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1685 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1686 Fixes bug #858016 .
1687
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001688- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1689 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1690 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1691
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001692- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1693 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1694 improves their performance (about 35%).
1695
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001696- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1697 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1698 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1699
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001700- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1701 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1702 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1703 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1704
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001705- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1706 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001707 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001708 length is not known).
1709
1710- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1711 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001712 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1713 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001714 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1715
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001716- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1717 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1718
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001719- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1720 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1721 keyword arguments.
1722
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001723- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1724 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1725 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1726
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001727- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1728 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1729 cases.
1730
1731- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1732 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1733 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1734 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1735 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1736 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1737 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1738 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1739 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1740 a release build.
1741
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001742- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1743 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1744
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001745- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001746 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001747
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001748- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1749 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1750 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1751 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1752 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1753 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1754 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1755 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1756 destroyed.
1757
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001758- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1759 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1760 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1761 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1762 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1763 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1764 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1765 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1766
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001767- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1768 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1769 character other than a space.
1770
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001771- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1772 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1773 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1774 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1775 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1776 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1777 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1778 attributes with the same name.
1779
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001780- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1781 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1782 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1783 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1784 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1785 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1786 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1787 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1788 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1789 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1790 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1791 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1792 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1793 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001794
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001795- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1796 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1797 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1798 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1799 This has been repaired.
1800
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001801- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1802
1803- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1804
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001805- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1806 over a sequence.
1807
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001808- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001809 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001810
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001811- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1812
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001813- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1814 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1815 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1816 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1817 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1818 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1819 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1820 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1821
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001822- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1823 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1824 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1825
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001826- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1827 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1828 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1829 freelist.
1830
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001831- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1832 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1833
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001834- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1835 number.
1836
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001837- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1838 a TypeError exception.
1839
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001840- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1841 820195.
1842
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001843- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1844 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1845 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1846
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001847- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001848 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1849 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001850
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001851- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1852 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1853 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1854
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001855- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1856 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001857 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001858
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001859- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001860 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1861 the first call.
1862
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001863
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001864Extension modules
1865-----------------
1866
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001867- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1868 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1869
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001870- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1871 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1872 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1873 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1874 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1875 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1876 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001877
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001878- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1879
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001880- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1881
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001882- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1883 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1884
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001885- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1886 fewer false positives.
1887
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001888- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1889 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1890
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001891- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001892 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1893
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001894- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001895 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001896 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001897 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1898 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001899
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001900- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1901 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1902 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1903 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1904
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001905- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1906 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1907 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1908 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1909 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1910 #897625.
1911
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001912- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1913 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1914
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001915- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1916 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1917 and pops on either side of the deque.
1918
1919- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1920 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1921
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001922- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1923 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1924 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1925 other functions that expect a function argument.
1926
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001927- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1928
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001929- os.getsid was added.
1930
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001931- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1932 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1933 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1934
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001935- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1936
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001937- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1938
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001939- readline.clear_history was added.
1940
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001941- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1942
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001943- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1944
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001945- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1946
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001947- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1948
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001949- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1950
1951- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1952
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001953- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1954
1955- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1956
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001957- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1958 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1959 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1960
1961- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1962 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1963 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1964 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1965 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1966 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1967 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1968
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001969- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1970 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1971 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1972 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001973
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001974- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001975 iterators from a single iterable.
1976
1977- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1978 of raising a TypeError exception.
1979
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001980- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1981 as parameter.
1982
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001983Library
1984-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001985
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001986- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1987
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001988- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1989 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1990 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001991
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001992- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1993 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1994 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001995
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001996- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001997
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001998- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1999 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002000
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002001- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2002 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2003
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002004- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2005
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002006- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002007 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002008
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002009- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002010 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002011
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002012- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2013
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002014- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2015 on cygwin and mingw32.
2016
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002017- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2018
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002019- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2020 module.
2021
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002022- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2023 installation scheme for all platforms.
2024
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002025- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002026 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002027
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002028- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2029 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2030 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2031
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002032- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2033 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2034 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2035
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002036- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2037
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002038- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2039
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002040- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2041 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2042
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002043- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2044 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2045 type pattern with the same value exists.
2046
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002047- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2048 when run from the command prompt).
2049
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002050- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2051 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2052
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002053- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2054 default sort).
2055
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002056- Added global runctx function to profile module
2057
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002058- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2059
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002060- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2061
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002062- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2063
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002064- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002065 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2066 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2067 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2068 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2069 accordingly.
2070
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002071- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2072 decoding standards.
2073
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002074- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2075 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2076 called for all requests.
2077
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002078- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2079 they are passed to the compiler.
2080
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002081- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2082 indent, width and depth.
2083
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002084- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2085 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2086
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002087- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2088 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2089
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002090- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2091
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002092- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2093
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002094- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2095
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002096- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2097 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2098
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002099- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002100 for better performance.
2101
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002102- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002103
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002104- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2105 a string).
2106
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002107- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2108
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002109- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2110
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002111- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2112
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002113- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2114
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002115- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2116 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2117 list of fieldnames.
2118
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002119- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2120 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2121
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002122- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2123
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002124- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2125 empty lists.
2126
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002127- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2128 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2129 and shelves.
2130
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002131- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2132 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2133
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002134- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002135 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2136 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002137
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002138- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2139 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002140 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002141
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002142- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002143 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2144 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2145
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002146- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2147 and removed in Py2.4.
2148
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002149- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2150
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002151- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2152
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002153Tools/Demos
2154-----------
2155
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002156- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2157 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2158
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002159- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2160
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002161- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2162 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2163 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2164 destination in situations where both files are given.
2165
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002166- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2167 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2168 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2169 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2170
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002171- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2172
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002173- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2174 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2175 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2176 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2177 now.
2178
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002179- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2180 in effect
2181
2182- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2183 C-c C-h
2184
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002185- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2186 -d option was given.
2187
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002188Build
2189-----
2190
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002191- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2192 build under OS X.
2193
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002194- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2195 --enable-profiling.
2196
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002197- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2198 is configured --with-tsc.
2199
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002200- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2201 on AMD64.
2202
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002203- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2204 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2205
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002206- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2207 removed.
2208
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002209- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2210 supported (see PEP 11).
2211
2212- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2213
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002214- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2215
2216- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2217 (see PEP 11).
2218
2219- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2220 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2221
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002222C API
2223-----
2224
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002225- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2226 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2227 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2228
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002229- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2230 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2231 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2232 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2233
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002234- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2235 generator objects.
2236
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002237- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2238 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002239 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2240 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002241
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002242- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2243 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2244
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002245- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2246 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2247 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2248 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2249 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2250
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002251- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2252 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2253 about 10% faster.
2254
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002255- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2256 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2257
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002258- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2259 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2260 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2261 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2262
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002263Windows
2264-------
2265
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002266- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2267 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2268 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2269 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2270
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002271- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2272 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2273 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2274
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002275
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002276What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2277===============================
2278
2279*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2280
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002281IDLE
2282----
2283
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002284- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2285 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2286 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2287 context-menu actions.
2288
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002289- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2290 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2291 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2292 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2293 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2294 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2295 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2296 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2297 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2298
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002299
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002300What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2301=============================================
2302
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002303*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002304
2305Core and builtins
2306-----------------
2307
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002308- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002309 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002310 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2311
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002312Extension modules
2313-----------------
2314
2315- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2316 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2317 than once. This has been fixed.
2318
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002319- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2320 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2321 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2322 call.
2323
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002324- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2325
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002326Library
2327-------
2328
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002329- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2330 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2331
2332- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2333 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2334 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2335 restored.
2336
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002337IDLE
2338----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002339
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002340- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002341
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002342Build
2343-----
2344
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002345- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2346 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2347
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002348C API
2349-----
2350
2351Windows
2352-------
2353
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002354- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2355 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2356
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002357- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2358
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002359Mac
2360---
2361
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002362- Various fixes to pimp.
2363
2364- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2365
2366- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2367 more problems than it solves.
2368
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002369
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002370What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2371=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002372
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002373*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2374
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002375Core and builtins
2376-----------------
2377
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002378- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2379 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2380
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002381- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2382 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002383 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002384
2385- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2386 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2387 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002388 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002389
2390- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2391 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002392
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002393- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2394 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2395 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2396
2397- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002398 770247.
2399
2400- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002401
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002402Extension modules
2403-----------------
2404
2405- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2406 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2407
2408- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2409
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002410- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2411
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002412- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2413 contained within the _strptime module.
2414
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002415- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2416 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2417
2418- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002419 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2420
2421- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2422 the find_class attribute, if present.
2423
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002424- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002425
2426 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2427 (SF bug 763298).
2428
2429 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002430 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2431 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2432 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002433
2434 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2435
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002436Library
2437-------
2438
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002439- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2440
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002441- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2442 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2443 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2444 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2445 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2446 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2447 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2448 or Tester().
2449
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002450- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2451 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2452 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2453 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2454 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2455 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2456 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2457 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2458 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002459
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002460 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002461
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002462- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2463 weren't before was an oversight.
2464
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002465- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2466 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2467
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002468- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2469 when there are no lines.
2470
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002471- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2472 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2473
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002474- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2475 to child processes.
2476
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002477- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2478
2479- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2480
2481- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2482 xmlrpclib.
2483
2484- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2485 responses.
2486
2487- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2488 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2489
2490- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2491 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2492 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2493
2494- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2495 used as patterns.
2496
2497- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2498 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2499 than Tk 8.3.
2500
2501- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2502
2503- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002504
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002505Tools/Demos
2506-----------
2507
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002508- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2509
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002510- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2511
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002512- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002513
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002514Build
2515-----
2516
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002517- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2518
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002519- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2520
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002521- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2522 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002523
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002524- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2525 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2526 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002527
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002528C API
2529-----
2530
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002531- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2532 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2533
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002534Windows
2535-------
2536
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002537- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2538 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2539 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2540 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2541 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2542 Python exception ::
2543
2544 thread.error: can't start new thread
2545
2546 is raised now.
2547
2548- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2549 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2550 instead of from DLL teardown.
2551
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002552Mac
2553---
2554
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002555- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002556 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002557 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2558 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2559 the executable in the bundle.
2560
2561- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002562
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002563- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2564
2565- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2566 on Panther.
2567
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002568What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2569================================
2570
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002571*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002572
2573Core and builtins
2574-----------------
2575
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002576- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2577 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2578 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2579 with the -i option.
2580
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002581- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2582 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2583
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002584- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2585 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2586
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002587- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2588 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2589 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2590 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2591 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2592 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2593 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2594 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2595 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2596 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2597 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2598 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2599 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002600
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002601- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2602 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2603 embedded in a lambda expression.
2604
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002605- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2606 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2607 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2608 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2609 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2610
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002611- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2612 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2613 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2614
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002615- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2616 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2617
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002618- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2619 It's writable again.
2620
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002621- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2622 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2623 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002624 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002625
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002626- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2627 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2628 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2629
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002630Extension modules
2631-----------------
2632
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002633- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2634 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2635
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002636- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2637 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2638 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2639 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2640
2641- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2642 collection.
2643
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002644- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2645 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2646 unique within a single program run.
2647
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002648- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2649 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2650
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002651- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2652 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2653
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002654- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2655 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002656
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002657- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2658
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002659- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2660 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2661
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002662- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2663 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2664 for many BSD-derived systems.
2665
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002666
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002667Library
2668-------
2669
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002670- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2671 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2672 primary ones:
2673
2674 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2675 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2676 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2677
2678 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2679 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2680 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2681 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2682 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2683 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2684
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002685- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2686 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2687 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2688 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2689 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2690 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2691 argument.
2692
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002693- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2694 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2695 in the archive.
2696
2697- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2698 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2699
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002700- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2701 569574).
2702
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002703- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2704 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2705 no more.
2706
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002707- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2708 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2709 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2710 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2711 code coverage.
2712
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002713- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2714 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2715 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002716 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2717 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002718
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002719- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2720 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2721 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002722 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002723
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002724- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2725
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002726- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2727 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2728 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2729 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2730
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002731- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2732 handling.
2733
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002734- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2735 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2736
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002737- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2738 in socket.py.
2739
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002740- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2741
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002742- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2743 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2744 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2745 opener with proxy support.
2746
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002747- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2748
2749- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2750
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002751Tools/Demos
2752-----------
2753
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002754- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2755
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002756- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2757
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002758- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2759 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002760
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002761- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2762 files.
2763
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002764Build
2765-----
2766
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002767- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002768 different root directory.
2769
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002770C API
2771-----
2772
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002773- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2774 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2775 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2776 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2777 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2778 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2779 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2780 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2781 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2782 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2783
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002784- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2785 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2786 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2787 from Python.
2788
2789
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002790New platforms
2791-------------
2792
2793None this time.
2794
2795Tests
2796-----
2797
2798- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2799 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2800
2801Windows
2802-------
2803
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002804- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2805
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002806- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2807 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2808 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2809 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2810 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2811 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2812 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2813 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2814 that's what it's for.
2815
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002816Mac
2817---
2818
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002819- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2820 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2821 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2822 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002823- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2824 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2825- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002826
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002827SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2828------------------------------------
2829
2830430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2831598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2832622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2833661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2834683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2835697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2836713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2837724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2838727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2839729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2840730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2841731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2842732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2843733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2844735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2845740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2846744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2847745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2848747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2849749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2850751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2851753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2852755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2853757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2854760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2855
2856
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002857What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2858================================
2859
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002860*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002861
2862Core and builtins
2863-----------------
2864
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002865- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2866 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2867
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002868- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2869 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2870 and cannot be strings).
2871
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002872- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2873 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2874 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2875 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2876
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002877- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2878 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2879 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2880 Python itself.
2881
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002882- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2883 the referenced object, if it has one.
2884
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002885- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2886 the thread started at
2887 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2888
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002889- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2890 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2891 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2892 placed on a list index.
2893
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002894- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2895 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2896 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2897 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2898
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002899- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2900 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2901 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2902 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2903 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2904 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2905 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2906
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002907- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2908 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2909 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2910 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2911 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2912
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002913- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2914 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002915
2916- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2917 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2918 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2919 #693195.)
2920
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002921- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2922 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002923
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002924- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002925 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002926 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2927 interpreter executions, would fail.
2928
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002929- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002930 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002931 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002932
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002933Extension modules
2934-----------------
2935
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002936- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2937 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2938 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2939 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2940
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002941- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2942 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2943
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002944- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2945 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2946 and Greg Chapman.)
2947
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002948- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2949 recursively.
2950
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002951- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002952 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2953 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2954 leaks.
2955
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002956- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2957
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002958- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2959 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2960 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2961 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2962 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2963 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2964 #705836.
2965
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002966- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002967 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2968
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002969- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2970 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2971 See SF bug #692416.
2972
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002973- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2974 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2975
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002976- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2977 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2978 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002979
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002980- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002981 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2982 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2983
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002984- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2985 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2986 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2987 timeouts to work properly.
2988
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002989Library
2990-------
2991
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002992- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2993 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2994 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2995 future release.
2996
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002997- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2998 for querying platform dependent features.
2999
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003000- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003001
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003002- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3003 pickle protocol versions.
3004
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003005- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3006 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3007 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3008
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003009- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3010
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003011- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3012 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3013 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3014 modules.
3015
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003016- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3017 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3018 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3019
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003020- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3021 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3022
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003023- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3024 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3025 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3026
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003027- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003028 MS Office extensions.
3029
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003030- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3031 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3032
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003033- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3034 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3035
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003036- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3037 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3038 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3039 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3040 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3041 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3042
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003043- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3044 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3045 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003046
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003047- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3048 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3049 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3050
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003051- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3052
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003053- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3054 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3055 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3056
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003057Tools/Demos
3058-----------
3059
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003060- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3061 See the module docstring for details.
3062
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003063Build
3064-----
3065
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003066- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3067 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003068
3069C API
3070-----
3071
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003072- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3073
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003074- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3075 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3076 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3077
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003078- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3079 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003080
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003081 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3082 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3083 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003084
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003085- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003086 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3087
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003088- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3089 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3090 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003091
3092New platforms
3093-------------
3094
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003095None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003096
3097Tests
3098-----
3099
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003100- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3101 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003102
3103Windows
3104-------
3105
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003106- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3107 function.
3108
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003109- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3110 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003111
3112Mac
3113---
3114
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003115- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3116 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003117
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003118- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3119 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003120
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003121- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3122 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3123 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003124
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003125- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003126 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3127 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003128
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003129- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3130 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003131
3132
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003133What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3134=================================
3135
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003136*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003137
3138Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003139-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003140
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003141- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3142 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3143 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3144
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003145- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3146 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3147 (SF patch #664376.)
3148
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003149- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3150 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3151 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3152 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3153 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3154 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003155 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003156
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003157- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3158 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3159 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3160 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003161 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003162
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003163- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3164 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3165 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3166 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3167 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3168 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3169 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3170 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3171 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3172 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3173 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3174
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003175- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3176 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3177 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3178 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3179 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3180 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3181
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003182- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3183 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3184
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003185- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3186 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3187 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3188 case.)
3189
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003190- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3191 passed as unicode strings.
3192
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003193- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3194 See SF bug #683467.
3195
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003196- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3197 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3198
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003199- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3200
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003201- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3202
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003203- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3204 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3205 arguments.
3206
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003207- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3208 See SF bug #667147.
3209
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003210- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003211 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003212 See SF bug #676155.
3213
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003214- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003215 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003216 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3217 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3218 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3219 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3220 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3221 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003222
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003223Extension modules
3224-----------------
3225
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003226- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3227 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3228 tp_as_number pointer.
3229
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003230- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3231 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3232 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3233 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3234 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3235
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003236- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3237
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003238- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3239
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003240- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003241 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003242 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3243 patch #678531.)
3244
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003245- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3246 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3247
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003248- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3249 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3250
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003251- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3252
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003253- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3254 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3255 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3256
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003257- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3258
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003259- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3260 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3261
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003262- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003263
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003264- datetime changes:
3265
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003266 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3267
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003268 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3269 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3270 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3271 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3272 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3273 now.
3274
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003275 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003276 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3277 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003278
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003279 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003280 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003281 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3282 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3283 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3284 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003285
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003286 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3287 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3288 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003289 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3290
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003291 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3292 by a later example coded by Guido.
3293
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003294 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003295 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3296 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3297 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003298 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3299 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3300
3301 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3302 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3303 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3304 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3305 tzinfo subclass instance.
3306
3307 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3308 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3309 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3310 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3311 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3312 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3313 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3314 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003315
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003316 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3317 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3318 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3319 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3320 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003321 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3322
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003323 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003324
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003325 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3326 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3327 as a naive datetime object.
3328
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003329 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3330 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3331 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3332
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003333 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3334 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3335 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3336 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3337 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3338 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3339 comparison.
3340
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003341 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3342 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3343 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3344 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003345 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003346
3347 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003348
3349 and ::
3350
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003351 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3352
3353 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3354 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3355 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3356 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3357
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003358 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3359 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3360 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3361 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3362 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3363
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003364 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3365 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003366 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3367 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003368
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003369Library
3370-------
3371
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003372- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3373 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3374
3375- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3376 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3377 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3378 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3379 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3380 See PEP 307 for details.
3381
3382- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3383 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3384
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003385- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3386 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003387 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003388 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3389 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003390 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003391
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003392- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3393 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3394
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003395- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3396 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3397 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3398
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003399- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3400
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003401- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3402 exception.
3403
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003404- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3405 class.
3406
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003407- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3408 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3409 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3410
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003411- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3412 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3413
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003414- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003415 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3416 See SF bug #659228.
3417
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003418- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3419 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3420 See SF patch #651082.
3421
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003422- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003423
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003424- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3425 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3426
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003427- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003428 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003429
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003430- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3431 DOS paths from other platforms.
3432
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003433Tools/Demos
3434-----------
3435
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003436- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3437 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3438 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3439 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3440 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3441 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3442 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3443 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3444 example:
3445
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003446 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3447 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003448
3449 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3450
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003451
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003452Build
3453-----
3454
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003455- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3456 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3457 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003458 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3459
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003460 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3461
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003462- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3463 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3464 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3465 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3466 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3467 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3468 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3469 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3470 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3471
3472- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3473 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3474 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3475 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3476
3477- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3478 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3479
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003480C API
3481-----
3482
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003483- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3484 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003485
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003486- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3487 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3488 tp_as_number pointer.
3489
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003490- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3491 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3492 (SF #681367)
3493
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003494- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3495 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3496 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3497 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003498
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003499Tests
3500-----
3501
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003502- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003503 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3504 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3505 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3506 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3507 pydoc.)
3508
3509- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3510
3511- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003512
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003513Windows
3514-------
3515
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003516- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3517 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3518 time).
3519
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003520- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3521 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3522
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003523- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3524 release without strong cryptography.
3525
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003526- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003527 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003528
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003529- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3530 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3531
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003532Mac
3533---
3534
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003535- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3536 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003537
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003538- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3539 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3540 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003541
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003542- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3543 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003544
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003545- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3546 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3547 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3548 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003549
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003550- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003551 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3552 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3553 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003554
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003555
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003556What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003557=================================
3558
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003559*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003560
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003561Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003562--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003563
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003564- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3565
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003566- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3567 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003568 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003569 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003570 a different meaning than before.
3571
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003572- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003573 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003574 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003575
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003576- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003577 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003578 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003579
3580- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3581 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3582 and deallocation.
3583
3584- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3585 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3586
3587- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3588 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3589 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3590 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3591 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3592
3593- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3594 now detected by the garbage collector.
3595
3596- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3597 [SF bug 519621]
3598
3599- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3600 identifier.
3601
3602- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3603 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3604 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3605 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3606 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3607 [SF bug 563060]
3608
3609- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3610 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3611 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3612 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3613 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3614
3615- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3616 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3617 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3618
3619- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3620
3621- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3622 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3623 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3624 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3625 state of the slots would be lost.)
3626
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003627Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003628-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003629
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003630- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003631 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3632 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3633 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3634 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003635 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3636 Jython 2.1.
3637
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003638- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003639 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003640 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3641 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3642 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3643 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3644 these, see PEP 302.
3645
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003646- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3647 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3648 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3649
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003650- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3651 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3652 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3653
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003654- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3655 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3656 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3657
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003658- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3659 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3660 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3661 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3662 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3663 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3664 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3665 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3666 releases or implementations.
3667
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003668- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003669 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3670 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003671
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003672- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3673 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3674
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003675- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3676 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3677 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3678
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003679- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3680 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3681
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003682- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3683 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003684 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3685 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003686
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003687- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3688 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3689 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3690 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3691 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3692
3693 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3694 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3695 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3696 pattern.
3697
3698 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3699 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3700 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3701 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3702
3703 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3704 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3705 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3706 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3707 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3708 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3709
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003710- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3711 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3712 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3713 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3714 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3715 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3716 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3717 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003718
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003719- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3720 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3721 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3722 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3723 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003724 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3725 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3726 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3727 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3728 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3729 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3730 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003731
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003732- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3733 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3734
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003735- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3736 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3737 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3738 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3739 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3740 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3741 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3742 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3743 to Zack Weinberg!
3744
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003745- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3746 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3747 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3748 type. This has been fixed now.
3749
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003750- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3751 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3752 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3753
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003754- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3755 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3756 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3757 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3758 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3759 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3760 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3761 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003762 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003763
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003764- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3765 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3766 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003767
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003768- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3769 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3770 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3771 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3772 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3773 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3774 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3775 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003776 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003777 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3778 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3779
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003780- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3781 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3782 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3783 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3784 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3785 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3786 this.)
3787
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003788- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3789 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003790 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003791 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003792 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3793 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003794 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3795 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003796
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003797- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3798 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3799 currently running.
3800
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003801- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3802 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3803 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3804 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3805
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003806- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3807 as directory names.
3808
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003809- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3810 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3811
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003812- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3813 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3814
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003815- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003816 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3817 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003818
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003819- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3820 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3821 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3822 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3823 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3824
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003825- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3826 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3827 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3828 removed.
3829
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003830- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3831 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3832 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3833
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003834- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3835 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3836 to __debug__.
3837
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003838- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3839 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3840 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3841
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003842- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3843 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3844 deprecated now.
3845
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003846- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3847 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3848 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003849
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003850- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3851 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3852 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3853 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3854 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003855
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003856- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3857 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3858
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003859- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3860 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3861 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003862 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003863 is backward compatible.
3864
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003865- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3866 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3867 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3868 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3869 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3870
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003871- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3872 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3873 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3874 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3875 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3876 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003877
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003878- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3879 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3880
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003881- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3882 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3883
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003884- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3885 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3886 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3887 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3888 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3889
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003890- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3891 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3892 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3893
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003894- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003895 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3896
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003897- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3898 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3899 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003900
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003901- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3902 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3903
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003904- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3905 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3906 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3907
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003908- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3909
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003910Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003911-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003912
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003913- Added three operators to the operator module:
3914 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3915 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3916 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3917
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003918- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3919
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003920- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3921 archives.
3922
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003923- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3924 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3925 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3926
3927 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3928
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003929- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3930 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3931 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003932 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003933
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003934- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3935 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3936 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3937 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003938 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3939 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3940 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3941 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003942
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003943- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3944 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003945
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003946- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3947
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003948- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3949 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3950
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003951- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3952 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3953 supported.
3954
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003955- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3956
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003957- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3958 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003959
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003960- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3961 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3962
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003963- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3964
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003965- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3966 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3967
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003968- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3969 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3970 functions but callable type objects.
3971
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003972- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003973 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003974 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003975
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003976- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3977 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003978
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003979- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3980 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003981
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003982- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3983 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3984 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3985 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3986
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003987- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3988 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003989
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003990- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3991 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3992 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3993 and __imul__.
3994
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003995- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003996 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3997 is called.
3998
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003999- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4000 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4001 interpreter was compiled.
4002
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004003- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4004 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4005 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004006 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004007 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4008 1, not 2.
4009
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004010- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4011 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4012 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4013 limit.
4014
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004015- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4016 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4017 bug #623464.
4018
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004019- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4020 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4021 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4022 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4023
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004024Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004025-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004026
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004027- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4028
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004029- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4030 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4031 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4032 with Python 2.3a2.
4033
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004034- os.path exposes getctime.
4035
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004036- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004037 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004038 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004039 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004040 unit tests of floating point results.
4041
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004042- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4043 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4044 has been increased.
4045
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004046- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4047 executed.
4048
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004049- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4050 postinstallation script.
4051
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004052- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4053 test the current module.
4054
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004055- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004056 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4057 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4058 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4059 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4060
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004061- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004062 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004063 Ward's Optik package.
4064
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004065- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4066 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4067 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4068 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4069
4070- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4071 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004072 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004073
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004074- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4075 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4076 shelf are binary pickles.
4077
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004078- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4079 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4080
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004081- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4082 modules are iterators now.
4083
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004084- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4085 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4086 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4087 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4088 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4089 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004090
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004091- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4092 with their entity value.
4093
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004094- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4095
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004096- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4097 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004098
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004099- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4100 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004101 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004102
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004103- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4104 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4105 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4106 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4107 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4108 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4109 main():
4110
4111 import locale
4112 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4113
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004114- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4115 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4116
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004117- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4118 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4119 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4120 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4121 to the new standard.
4122
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004123- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4124 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4125 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4126 an extension to the database.
4127
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004128- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4129 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4130 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4131 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004132 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004133
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004134- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004135 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004136
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004137- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4138 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4139 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4140 bounded integers.
4141
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004142- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4143 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4144 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4145 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4146 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4147 in existence.
4148
4149 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4150 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4151 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4152 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4153 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4154 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4155
4156 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4157 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4158 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4159 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4160
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004161- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4162 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4163 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4164
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004165- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4166
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004167- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4168 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4169 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4170 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4171
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004172- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4173 argument.
4174
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004175- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4176 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4177 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4178 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4179 [SF patch 560794].
4180
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004181- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4182 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4183 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004184 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4185 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4186 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004187
4188- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4189 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004190
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004191- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4192 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4193 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4194 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004195
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004196- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4197 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4198 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4199 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4200 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4201
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004202- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004203
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004204- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4205
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004206- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4207 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4208 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4209 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4210 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4211 identical to None.
4212
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004213- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4214 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4215 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4216 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4217 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4218 results now.
4219
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004220- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4221 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4222
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004223- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4224 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4225 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4226 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4227 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4228 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4229 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4230 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4231
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004232- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4233
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004234- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4235 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4236
4237- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4238 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4239 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4240 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4241 and other systems.
4242
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004243- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4244 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4245 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4246 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 +00004247 work well with these.
4248
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004249- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4250
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004251- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004252 connections.
4253
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004254- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4255 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4256 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4257
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004258- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4259 sets
4260
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004261- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4262 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4263 name.
4264
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004265- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4266 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4267 passed in.
4268
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004269- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004270 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004271 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4272 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004273
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004274- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4275
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004276- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4277
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004278- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4279 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4280 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4281
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004282- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4283 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4284 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4285 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004286 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004287
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004288- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004289 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004290 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004291
4292- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4293 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4294 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4295
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004296- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004297 the value of its expression argument.
4298
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004299- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4300 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4301 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4302
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004303- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4304 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4305 skipstone browser was included.
4306
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004307- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4308 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4309
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004310Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004311-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004312
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004313- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4314 names in addition to accepting file names.
4315
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004316- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4317 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4318 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4319 still used and useful.)
4320
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004321- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4322 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4323 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4324 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004325
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004326- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4327 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4328 the generated binary.
4329
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004330Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004331-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004332
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004333- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4334
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004335- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4336 except in the hands of experts.
4337
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004338- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004339 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4340 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4341 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004342
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004343- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4344 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4345 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4346 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4347 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4348 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4349 builds.
4350
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004351- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4352 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4353 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4354 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4355 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4356 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4357 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4358 new type.
4359
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004360- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004361
4362 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4363 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4364 positive infinities.
4365
4366 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4367 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4368 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4369 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4370 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4371 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4372 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4373
4374 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4375
4376 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4377
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004378- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4379 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4380 size of the executable.
4381
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004382- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4383 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4384 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4385 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004386
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004387- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4388
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004389- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4390 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4391 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004392
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004393- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4394 well as Unix.
4395
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004396- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4397 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4398 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4399 modules in the README file for details.
4400
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004401C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004402-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004403
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004404- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4405 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004406 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004407 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004408 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004409
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004410- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4411 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4412 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4413 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4414 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4415 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004416 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004417 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4418 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4419 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4420 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4421 aligned.)
4422
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004423- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4424 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4425 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4426
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004427- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4428 level.
4429
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004430- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4431 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4432 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4433 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4434 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4435
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004436- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4437 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4438 code.
4439
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004440- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4441 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4442 adjusting for negative indices.
4443
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004444- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4445 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4446 object.
4447
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004448- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4449 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4450 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4451
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004452- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4453 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004454
4455- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4456
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004457- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4458 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4459 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4460 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4461
4462- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4463
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004464- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004465
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004466- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004467 without going through the buffer API.
4468
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004469- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004470
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004471- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4472 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4473 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4474 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4475
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004476- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4477 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4478
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004479- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004480 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4481
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004482New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004483-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004484
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004485- OpenVMS is now supported.
4486
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004487- AtheOS is now supported.
4488
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004489- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4490
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004491- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4492
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004493Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004494-----
4495
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004496- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4497 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4498 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004499
4500Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004501-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004502
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004503- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4504 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4505 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4506 bugs.
4507 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004508 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004509 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4510 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004511 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004512
4513- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004514 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004515
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004516- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4517 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4518
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004519- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4520 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004521 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004522 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4523
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004524- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4525 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4526 use files" uninstall option).
4527
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004528- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4529
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004530- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4531 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4532
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004533- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4534 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4535 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4536
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004537- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4538 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4539 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4540 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4541 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004542 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4543 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4544 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004545
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004546- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004547 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004548 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4549 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4550 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4551 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4552 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4553 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4554 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4555 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4556 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4557 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4558 work around.
4559
4560- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4561 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4562 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4563 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4564 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4565 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4566 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4567 specified with O_CREAT too).
4568
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004569Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004570----
4571
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004572- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004573
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004574- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4575 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4576 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4577
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004578- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4579 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4580 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4581
4582- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4583 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4584 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4585 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4586 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4587 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4588 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4589 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004590
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004591- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4592 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4593 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004594
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004595- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4596 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4597 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4598 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4599 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004600
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004601- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4602 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4603 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004604
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004605- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4606 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004607
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004608- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4609 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4610 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4611 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4612 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004613
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004614- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4615 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4616 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4617
4618- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4619 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4620 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004621
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004622- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4623 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4624 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4625 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004626 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004627
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004628- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4629 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004630
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004631- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4632 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004633
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004634- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004635 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004636 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4637 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004638
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004639
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004640What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004641===============================
4642
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004643*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4644
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004645Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004646--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004647
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004648- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4649 with a custom metaclass.
4650
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004651Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004652-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004653
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004654- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4655 are proxies.
4656
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004657Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004658-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004659
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004660- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4661 very short strings.
4662
4663- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4664 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4665 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4666 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4667 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4668
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004669Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004670-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004671
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004672- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4673 close or delete time).
4674
4675- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4676 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4677
4678- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4679
4680- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004681 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004682
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004683Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004684-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004685
4686Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004687-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004688
4689C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004690-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004691
4692New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004693-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004694
4695Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004696-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004697
4698Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004699-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004700
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004701- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4702
4703- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4704 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4705
4706- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4707 deleted at process exit time.
4708
4709- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4710 in backslash.
4711
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004712Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004713----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004714
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004715- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4716 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4717 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4718
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004719
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004720What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004721===========================
4722
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4724
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004725Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004726--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004727
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004728- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4729 been extensively updated. See
4730
4731 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4732
4733 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4734
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004735- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4736 deleted!
4737
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004738- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4739 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4740 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4741 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4742 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4743
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004744- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4745
4746 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4747 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4748
4749 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4750 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4751 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4752 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4753 supported anyway.
4754
4755 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4756 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4757
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004758- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4759 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4760 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4761 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4762 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004763
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004764- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4765 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4766 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4767
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004768Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004769-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004770
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004771- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4772 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4773 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4774 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4775 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4776 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004777 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4778 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4779 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4780 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004781
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004782- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4783 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4784 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4785
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004786Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004787-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004788
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004789- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4790
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004791Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004792-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004793
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004794- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4795 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4796 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4797 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4798 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4799 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4800
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004801- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4802
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004803- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4804
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004805- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4806
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004807- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4808 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4809 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4810
4811- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4812
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004813Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004814-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004815
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004816- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4817 off a search on Google.
4818
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004819Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004820-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004821
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004822- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4823 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4824 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4825 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4826 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4827 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4828 other platforms should do likewise.
4829
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004830- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4831 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4832 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4833
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004834C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004835-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004836
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004837- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4838 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4839 producing key-value pairs.
4840
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004841- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004842 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004843 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4844 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4845 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4846 previously went unchallenged.
4847
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004848New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004849-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004850
4851Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004852-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004853
4854Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004855-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004856
4857Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004858----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004859
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004860- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4861 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004862
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004863- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4864 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4865 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4866 home.
4867
4868
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004869What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004870===========================
4871
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004872*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4873
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004874Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004875--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004876
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004877- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4878 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004879
4880 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004881 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004882
4883 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4884 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004885 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004886 This needs to be documented.
4887
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004888- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4889 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4890
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004891- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4892 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4893 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4894
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004895- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4896 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4897
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004898- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4899 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4900 class forbids it).
4901
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004902- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4903 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4904 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4905
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004906- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4907
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004908Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004909-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004910
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004911- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4912 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004913 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004914
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004915- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4916 (like 1 + '').
4917
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004918Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004919-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004920
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004921- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4922 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4923 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4924 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004925 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004926 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4927
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004928- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4929 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4930 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4931 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4932
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004933- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4934 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004935 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4936 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4937 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004938
4939- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4940 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004941
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004942- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4943 bytes on its input.
4944
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004945Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004946-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004947
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004948- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004949 convenience function.
4950
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004951- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4952 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4953 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004954 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4955 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4956 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4957 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4958 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4959 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004960
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004961- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4962 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4963 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4964 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4965
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004966- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4967 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4968 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4969
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004970- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4971 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4972 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4973 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4974
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004975- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4976 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004977 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004978 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4979 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4980 new -l and -e options.
4981
4982- statcache is now deprecated.
4983
4984- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4985 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004986 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004987 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4988 time properly taken into account.
4989
4990- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4991 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4992 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4993 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4994
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004995Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004996-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004997
4998Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004999-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005000
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005001- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5002 is built with libdb3 if available.
5003
5004- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5005
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005006C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005007-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005008
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005009- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5010 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5011 PySequence_Size().
5012
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005013- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5014
5015- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5016 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5017 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5018
5019- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5020 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5021
5022- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5023 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5024
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005025New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005026-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005027
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005028- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5029 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5030
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005031- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5032 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5033
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005034- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5035
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005036Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005037-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005038
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005039- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5040 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5041
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005042Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005043-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005044
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005045Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005046----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005047
5048- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5049 removed completely in the next release.
5050
5051- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5052 OSX.
5053
5054- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5055 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5056
5057- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5058
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005059
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005060What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005061===========================
5062
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005063*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5064
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005065Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005066--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005067
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005068- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005069 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005070 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005071 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5072 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005073 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5074 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005075 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5076 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005077
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005078- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5079 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5080
5081- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5082 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5083
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005084Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005085-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005086
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005087- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5088 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5089 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5090 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5091 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5092 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5093 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5094 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5095
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005096- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5097 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5098 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5099 example).
5100
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005101- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005102 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005103 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005104 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005105
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005106- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5107 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5108 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005109 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005110
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005111- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5112 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5113 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5114 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5115 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5116 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5117
5118 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5119
5120 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5121
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005122Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005123-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005124
5125- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5126
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005127- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5128
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005129- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5130 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005131
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005132- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5133 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5134 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5135 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5136 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5137 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005138 attributes.
5139
5140- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5141 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5142 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005143
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005144- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5145 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5146 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005147
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005148- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5149 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5150 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005151 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5152 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5153
5154- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5155 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005156
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005157Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005158-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005159
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005160- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5161 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5162
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005163- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5164 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5165 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5166 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5167
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005168- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5169 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5170 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5171 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5172
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005173 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5174 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5175 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5176 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5177 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5178 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5179 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5180 without losing information).
5181
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005182- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005183 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5184 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5185 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5186 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5187 module).
5188
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005189 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005190 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5191 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5192 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5193 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005194
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005195- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005196 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5197 encoding.
5198
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005199- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5200 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5201
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005202- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005203 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5204
5205- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5206 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5207 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5208 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5209
5210- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5211
5212- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5213 ON, and OFF.
5214
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005215- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5216 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5217
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005218Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005219-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005220
5221- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5222 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5223 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005224
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005225- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5226 been added: -X and -E.
5227
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005228Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005229-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005230
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005231- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5232 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5233
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005234C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005235-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005236
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005237- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5238 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5239 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5240 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5241 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5242
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005243- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5244 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5245 as long) arguments.
5246
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005247- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5248 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5249 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5250 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5251 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5252 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5253
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005254- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5255 input.
5256
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005257New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005258-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005259
5260Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005261-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005262
5263Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005264-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005265
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005266- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5267 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5268 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5269
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005270- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5271 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5272 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005273 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005274
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005275 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5276 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5277 import signal
5278 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005279
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005280 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005281 while 1:
5282 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005283 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005284 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5285 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5286 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5287 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005288
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005289
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005290What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5291===========================
5292
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005293*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5294
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005295Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005296--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005297
5298- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5299 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5300 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5301
5302- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5303 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5304 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5305 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5306 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5307 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5308 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005309
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005310- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005311 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005312 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5313 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5314 associate a docstring with a property.
5315
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005316- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5317 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5318 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5319 other built-in object types.
5320
5321- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5322 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5323 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5324 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5325 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5326
5327- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5328 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5329
5330- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5331 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005332 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005333 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5334 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5335 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5336 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5337 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5338
5339- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5340 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5341 class.
5342
5343- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5344 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5345 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5346 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5347
5348- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5349 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5350 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5351 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5352
5353- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5354 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5355
5356- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5357 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5358 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5359 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5360 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005361 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005362 with the same value as s.
5363
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005364- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5365
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005366Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005367----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005368
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005369- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5370
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005371- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5372 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5373 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5374 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5375 objects.
5376
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005377- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5378 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005379 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5380 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5381
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005382- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5383 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5384 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5385
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005386Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005387-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005388
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005389- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5390 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5391 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5392 by the instances.
5393
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005394- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5395 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5396 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5397
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005398- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5399 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5400 before the entire comparison is complete.
5401
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005402- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5403 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5404 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5405
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005406- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5407 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5408 getwriter().
5409
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005410- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5411 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5412
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005413- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005414 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5415 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5416
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005417- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5418 iterable object.
5419
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005420- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5421 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005422
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005423- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5424 authentication.
5425
5426- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5427 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005428
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005429- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005430 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5431 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5432 a sample driver.)
5433
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005434Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005435-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005436
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005437- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5438 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5439 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5440 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5441 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5442 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5443 kernel has large file support.
5444
5445- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5446 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5447 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5448 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5449 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5450
5451- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5452 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5453 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5454
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005455C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005456-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005457
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005458- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5459 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5460
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005461New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005462-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005463
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005464- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5465 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5466
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005467Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005468-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005469
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005470- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5471 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5472 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5473 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5474 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5475
5476- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5477 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5478 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5479 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5480
5481- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5482 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5483
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005484Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005485-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005486
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005487- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005488 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5489 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005490
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005491
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005492What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5493===========================
5494
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005495*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5496
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005497Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005498----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005499
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005500- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5501 big to represent as a C double.
5502
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005503- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5504 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5505 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5506 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5507 restriction).
5508
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005509- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5510 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5511 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5512 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5513 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5514
5515 >>> dir([])
5516 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5517 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5518 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5519 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5520 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5521 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5522 'reverse', 'sort']
5523
5524 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5525
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005526- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005527 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5528 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5529 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5530 OverflowError exception.
5531
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005532- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005533 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005534 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5535 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5536 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5537 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5538 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005539 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005540 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5541 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5542
5543 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5544 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5545 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5546 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005547
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005548- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005549 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5550 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5551 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5552 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5553 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5554 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5555 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5556 once it is created.
5557
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005558- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5559 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5560 (key, value) pairs.
5561
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005562- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005563 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5564 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5565
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005566- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5567 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5568 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5569 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5570 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005571
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005572- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005573 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5574 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5575
5576 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5577
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005578- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005579 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5580
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005581Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005582-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005583
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005584- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005585 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5586 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005587
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005588- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5589 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5590 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5591 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5592 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5593 in this area anymore).
5594
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005595- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5596 threading.Timer.
5597
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005598- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5599 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5600
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005601- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005602 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5603
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005604- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005605 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5606 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5607 converted to Python longs.
5608
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005609- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005610 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5611
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005612- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5613 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5614 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5615
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005616Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005617-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005618
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005619- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5620 division operators as per PEP 238.
5621
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005622Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005623-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005624
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005625- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5626 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5627 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5628 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5629
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005630C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005631-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005632
5633- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005634
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005635- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5636 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005637 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005638
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005639 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5640 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005641 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005642 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005643
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005644- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005645 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5646 module:
5647
5648 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005649
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005650 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5651 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005652
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005653 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5654 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005655
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005656 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5657
5658 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5659
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005660- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005661 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5662 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5663 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005664
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005665New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005666-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005667
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005668- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5669 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5670 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5671 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5672 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005673
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005674Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005675-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005676
5677Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005678-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005679
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005680- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5681 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5682 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5683 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005684 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5685 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5686 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5687 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5688 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005689
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005690- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005691 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5692
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005693
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005694What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5695===========================
5696
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005697*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5698
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005699Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005700-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005701
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005702- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5703 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5704
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005705- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5706 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5707 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005708
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005709- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5710 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5711 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5712 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005713
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005714- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5715
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005716- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005717
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005718Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005719-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005720
5721- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005722 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005723 the module docstring for details.
5724
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005725Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005726-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005727
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005728- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005729 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5730 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5731 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005732
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005733- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5734 Nick Mathewson.
5735
5736Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005737----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005738
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005739- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5740 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5741 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5742 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5743 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5744 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5745 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5746 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5747
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005748- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5749 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5750 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5751 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5752
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005753- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5754 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5755 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5756 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5757 come a long way).
5758
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005759- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5760 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5761 write filters for these warnings).
5762
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005763- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5764 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5765 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5766 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5767 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5768
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005769- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5770 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5771 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5772 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5773 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5774 older distribution.
5775
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005776Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005777-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005778
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005779- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5780 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005781 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005782
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005783- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5784 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5785 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5786
5787- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5788
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005789- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5790
5791- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5792
5793- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5794
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005795- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005796
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005797- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5798
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005799New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005800-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005801
5802C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005803-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005804
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005805- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5806 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5807 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5808 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5809 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5810 against buffer overruns.
5811
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005812- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005813 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5814 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005815 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5816 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5817 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5818
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005819- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5820 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5821 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5822 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5823 deprecated.
5824
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005825Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005826-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005827
5828- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5829 relevant is found.
5830
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005831
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005832What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005833===========================
5834
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005835*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5836
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005837Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005838----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005839
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005840- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5841 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5842 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5843 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5844 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5845 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5846 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5847 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005848 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005849 repaired.
5850
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005851- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005852 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005853 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5854 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5855 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5856 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5857 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5858 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5859 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5860 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5861
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005862- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5863 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5864 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5865 leading BMO character).
5866
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005867- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5868 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5869 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5870
5871 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5872 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5873 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005874
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005875 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5876 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5877 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5878 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5879 for various simple to use conversions.
5880
5881 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5882 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5883
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005884 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5885 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5886 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5887 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5888 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5889 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5890 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5891 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5892 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5893 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5894 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5895 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5896 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5897 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5898 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005899
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005900- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5901 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5902 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005903 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005904 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005905
5906 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005907 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5908 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5909 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5910 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5911 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005912 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5913 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005914
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005915 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5916 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5917 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005918 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005919
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005920- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5921 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5922 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5923 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5924 floating arithmetic,
5925
5926 x = 9007199254740992.0
5927 print long(x)
5928
5929 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5930 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5931 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5932 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5933 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5934 functions are of good quality).
5935
5936 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5937 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5938 algorithms to break.
5939
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005940- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5941 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5942 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5943 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5944 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5945 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5946 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5947 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5948 order.
5949
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005950- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5951 operation along the most common code paths.
5952
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005953- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5954 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5955
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005956- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5957 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5958 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5959 {}.update(UserDict())
5960
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005961- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5962 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5963 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5964 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5965 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5966 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5967 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5968 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5969
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005970- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005971 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005972
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005973 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005974 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5975 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005976 join() method of strings
5977 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005978 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5979 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005980 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005981 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005982
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005983- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5984 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5985
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005986- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5987 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5988
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005989- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5990 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5991 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5992 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5993
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005994- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5995 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005996 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005997 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5998 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005999
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006000- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6001
6002
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006003Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006004-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006005
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006006- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006007 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006008 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6009 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6010
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006011- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6012 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6013
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006014- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6015 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6016 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6017 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6018
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006019- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6020 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6021 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6022
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006023- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6024
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006025- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6026
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006027- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6028 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6029 that are still imported into string.py).
6030
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006031- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6032
6033- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6034 Now it does.
6035
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006036- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6037
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006038- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6039 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6040 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6041 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6042 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006043 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6044 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006045
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006046- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6047 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6048 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6049 'help(object)'.
6050
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006051Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006052-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006053
6054- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006055 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006056 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6057 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6058
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006059- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006060 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6061 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006062
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006063C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006064-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006065
6066- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6067 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006068
6069----
6070
6071**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**