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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000015- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000016 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000017
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000018- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000019 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000020 which was missing for no apparent reason.
21
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000022- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000023 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
24 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
25
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000026- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
27 types that support garbage collection.
28
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000029- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
30
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +000031- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
32 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
33 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
34 Jython.
35
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000036Extension modules
37-----------------
38
39Library
40-------
41
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +000042- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
43 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
44 when dummy_threading is being used.
45
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +000046- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
47 from a tarfile.
48
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000049- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
50 GNU longname/longlink creation.
51
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +000052- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
53 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
54 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
55 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
56
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +000057- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
58 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
59
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +000060- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
61 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
62 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
63 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
64 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
65 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
66 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
67 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
68 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
69 by some other method in progress).
70
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000071- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
72 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
73 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +000074
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +000075- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
76
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +000077- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
78 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
79 AM Kuchling.
80
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +000081- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
82 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
83 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
84
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +000085- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
86 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
87 instead of unsigned.
88
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000089- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +000090 no longer part of the public API.
91
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +000092- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
93 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
94 string methods of the same name).
95
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +000096- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
97 SF patch 982681.
98
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000099- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000100 SF patch 945642.
101
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000102- doctest unittest integration improvements:
103
104 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
105
106 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
107 DocTestSuites.
108
109- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
110 that provide thread-local data.
111
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000112- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
113 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
114
115
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000116Tools/Demos
117-----------
118
119Build
120-----
121
122C API
123-----
124
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000125- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
126 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
127
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000128Documentation
129-------------
130
131Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
132
133 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
134 assigning thier values
135
136 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
137
138 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
139
140
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000141New platforms
142-------------
143
144Tests
145-----
146
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000147- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
148 platforms that use the Makefile.
149
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000150Windows
151-------
152
153Mac
154---
155
156
157
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000158What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
159=================================
160
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000161*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000162
163Core and builtins
164-----------------
165
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000166- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
167 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
168 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
169 objects now (one object instead of three).
170
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000171- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
172 Windows DLLs.
173
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000174- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
175
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000176- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
177 a new .pyc magic.
178
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000179- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
180 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
181 be there.
182
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000183- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
184 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
185 the LC_NUMERIC category.
186
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000187- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
188 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
189 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
190
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000191- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
192
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000193- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
194 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
195 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000196
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000197- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
198 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
199
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000200- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
201
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000202- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000203 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000204
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000205- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
206
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000207- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
208
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000209- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
210 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
211
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000212- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
213 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
214 Fixes bug #858016 .
215
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000216- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
217 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
218 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
219
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000220- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
221 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
222 improves their performance (about 35%).
223
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000224- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
225 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
226 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
227
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000228- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
229 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
230 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
231 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
232
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000233- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
234 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
235 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
236 length is not known).
237
238- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
239 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000240 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
241 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000242 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
243
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000244- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
245 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
246
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000247- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
248 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
249 keyword arguments.
250
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000251- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
252 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
253 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
254
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000255- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
256 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
257 cases.
258
259- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
260 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
261 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
262 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
263 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
264 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
265 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
266 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
267 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
268 a release build.
269
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000270- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
271 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
272
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000273- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000274 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000275
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000276- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
277 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
278 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
279 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
280 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
281 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
282 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
283 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
284 destroyed.
285
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000286- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
287 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
288 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
289 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
290 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
291 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
292 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
293 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
294
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000295- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
296 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
297 character other than a space.
298
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000299- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
300 by the function object or by the method object, the function
301 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
302 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
303 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
304 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
305 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
306 attributes with the same name.
307
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000308- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
309 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
310 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
311 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
312 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
313 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
314 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
315 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
316 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
317 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
318 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
319 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
320 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
321 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000322
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000323- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
324 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
325 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
326 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
327 This has been repaired.
328
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000329- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
330
331- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
332
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000333- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
334 over a sequence.
335
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000336- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000337 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000338
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000339- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
340
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000341- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
342 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
343 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
344 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
345 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
346 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
347 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
348 records with equal keys is unchanged).
349
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000350- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
351 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
352 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
353
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000354- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
355 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
356 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
357 freelist.
358
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000359- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
360 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
361
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000362- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
363 number.
364
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000365- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
366 a TypeError exception.
367
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000368- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
369 820195.
370
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000371- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
372 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
373 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
374
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000375- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000376 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
377 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000378
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000379- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
380 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
381 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
382
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000383- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
384 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000385 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000386
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000387- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000388 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
389 the first call.
390
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000391
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000392Extension modules
393-----------------
394
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000395- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
396 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
397
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000398- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
399 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
400 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
401 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
402 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
403 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
404 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000405
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000406- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
407
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000408- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
409
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000410- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
411 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
412
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000413- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
414 fewer false positives.
415
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000416- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
417 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
418
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000419- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000420 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
421
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000422- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000423 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000424 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
425 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
426 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000427
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000428- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
429 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
430 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
431 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
432
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000433- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
434 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
435 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
436 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
437 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
438 #897625.
439
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000440- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
441 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
442
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000443- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
444 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
445 and pops on either side of the deque.
446
447- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
448 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
449
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000450- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
451 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
452 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
453 other functions that expect a function argument.
454
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000455- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
456
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000457- os.getsid was added.
458
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000459- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
460 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
461 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
462
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000463- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
464
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000465- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
466
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000467- readline.clear_history was added.
468
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000469- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
470
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000471- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
472
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000473- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
474
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000475- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
476
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000477- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
478
479- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
480
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000481- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
482
483- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
484
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000485- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
486 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
487 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
488
489- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
490 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
491 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
492 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
493 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
494 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
495 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
496
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000497- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
498 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
499 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
500 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000501
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000502- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000503 iterators from a single iterable.
504
505- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
506 of raising a TypeError exception.
507
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000508- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
509 as parameter.
510
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000511Library
512-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000513
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000514- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
515 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
516 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000517
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000518- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
519 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
520 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000521
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000522- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000523
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000524- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
525 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000526
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000527- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
528 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
529
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000530- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
531
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000532- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000533 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000534
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000535- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
536 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
537
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000538- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
539
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000540- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
541 on cygwin and mingw32.
542
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000543- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
544
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000545- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
546 module.
547
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000548- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
549 installation scheme for all platforms.
550
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000551- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000552 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000553
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000554- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
555 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
556 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
557
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000558- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
559 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
560 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
561
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000562- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
563
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000564- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
565
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000566- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
567 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
568
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000569- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
570 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
571 type pattern with the same value exists.
572
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000573- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
574 when run from the command prompt).
575
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000576- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
577 not taken into consideration when caching value.
578
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000579- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
580 default sort).
581
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000582- Added global runctx function to profile module
583
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000584- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
585
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000586- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
587
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000588- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
589
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000590- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000591 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
592 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
593 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
594 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
595 accordingly.
596
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000597- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
598 decoding standards.
599
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000600- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
601 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
602 called for all requests.
603
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000604- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
605 they are passed to the compiler.
606
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000607- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
608 indent, width and depth.
609
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000610- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
611 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
612
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000613- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
614 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
615
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000616- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
617
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000618- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
619
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000620- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
621
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000622- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
623 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
624
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000625- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000626 for better performance.
627
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000628- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000629
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000630- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
631 a string).
632
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000633- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
634
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000635- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
636
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000637- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
638
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000639- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
640
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000641- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
642 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
643 list of fieldnames.
644
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000645- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
646 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
647
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000648- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
649
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000650- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
651 empty lists.
652
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000653- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
654 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
655 and shelves.
656
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000657- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
658 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
659
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000660- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000661 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
662 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000663
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000664- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
665 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000666 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000667
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000668- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000669 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
670 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
671
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000672- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
673 and removed in Py2.4.
674
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000675- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
676
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000677- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
678
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000679Tools/Demos
680-----------
681
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000682- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
683 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
684
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000685- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
686
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000687- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
688 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
689 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
690 destination in situations where both files are given.
691
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000692- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
693 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
694 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
695 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
696
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000697- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
698
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000699- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
700 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
701 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
702 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
703 now.
704
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000705- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
706 in effect
707
708- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
709 C-c C-h
710
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000711- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
712 -d option was given.
713
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000714Build
715-----
716
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000717- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
718 build under OS X.
719
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000720- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
721 --enable-profiling.
722
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000723- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
724 is configured --with-tsc.
725
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000726- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
727 on AMD64.
728
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000729- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
730 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
731
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000732- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
733 removed.
734
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000735- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
736 supported (see PEP 11).
737
738- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
739
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000740- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
741
742- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
743 (see PEP 11).
744
745- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
746 sizeof(char) must be 1.
747
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000748C API
749-----
750
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000751- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
752 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
753 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
754
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000755- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
756 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
757 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
758 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
759
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000760- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
761 generator objects.
762
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000763- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
764 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000765 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
766 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000767
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000768- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
769 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
770
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000771- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
772 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
773 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
774 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
775 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
776
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000777- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
778 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
779 about 10% faster.
780
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000781- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
782 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
783
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000784- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
785 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
786 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
787 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
788
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000789Windows
790-------
791
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000792- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
793 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
794 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
795 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
796
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000797- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
798 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
799 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
800
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000801
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000802What's New in Python 2.3 final?
803===============================
804
805*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
806
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000807IDLE
808----
809
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000810- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
811 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
812 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
813 context-menu actions.
814
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000815- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
816 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
817 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
818 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
819 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
820 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
821 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
822 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
823 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
824
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000825
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000826What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
827=============================================
828
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000829*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000830
831Core and builtins
832-----------------
833
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000834- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000835 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000836 comment at the end are still unsupported.
837
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000838Extension modules
839-----------------
840
841- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
842 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
843 than once. This has been fixed.
844
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000845- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
846 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
847 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
848 call.
849
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000850- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
851
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000852Library
853-------
854
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000855- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
856 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
857
858- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
859 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
860 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
861 restored.
862
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000863IDLE
864----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000865
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000866- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000867
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000868Build
869-----
870
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000871- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
872 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
873
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000874C API
875-----
876
877Windows
878-------
879
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000880- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
881 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
882
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000883- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
884
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000885Mac
886---
887
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000888- Various fixes to pimp.
889
890- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
891
892- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
893 more problems than it solves.
894
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000895
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000896What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
897=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000898
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000899*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
900
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000901Core and builtins
902-----------------
903
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000904- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
905 by sys.setcheckinterval().
906
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000907- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
908 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000909 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000910
911- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
912 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
913 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000914 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000915
916- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
917 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000918
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000919- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
920 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
921 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
922
923- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000924 770247.
925
926- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000927
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000928Extension modules
929-----------------
930
931- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
932 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
933
934- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
935
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000936- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
937
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000938- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
939 contained within the _strptime module.
940
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000941- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
942 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
943
944- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000945 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
946
947- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
948 the find_class attribute, if present.
949
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000950- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000951
952 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
953 (SF bug 763298).
954
955 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000956 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
957 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
958 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000959
960 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
961
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000962Library
963-------
964
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000965- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
966
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000967- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
968 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
969 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
970 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
971 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
972 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
973 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
974 or Tester().
975
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000976- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
977 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
978 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
979 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
980 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
981 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
982 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
983 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
984 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000985
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000986 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000987
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000988- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
989 weren't before was an oversight.
990
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000991- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
992 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
993
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000994- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
995 when there are no lines.
996
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000997- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
998 which could occur with Tk 8.4
999
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001000- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1001 to child processes.
1002
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001003- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1004
1005- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1006
1007- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1008 xmlrpclib.
1009
1010- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1011 responses.
1012
1013- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1014 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1015
1016- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1017 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1018 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1019
1020- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1021 used as patterns.
1022
1023- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1024 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1025 than Tk 8.3.
1026
1027- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1028
1029- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001030
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001031Tools/Demos
1032-----------
1033
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001034- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1035
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001036- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1037
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001038- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001039
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001040Build
1041-----
1042
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001043- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1044
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001045- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1046
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001047- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1048 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001049
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001050- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1051 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1052 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001053
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001054C API
1055-----
1056
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001057- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1058 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1059
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001060Windows
1061-------
1062
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001063- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1064 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1065 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1066 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1067 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1068 Python exception ::
1069
1070 thread.error: can't start new thread
1071
1072 is raised now.
1073
1074- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1075 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1076 instead of from DLL teardown.
1077
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001078Mac
1079---
1080
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001081- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001082 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001083 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1084 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1085 the executable in the bundle.
1086
1087- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001088
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001089- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1090
1091- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1092 on Panther.
1093
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001094What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1095================================
1096
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001097*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001098
1099Core and builtins
1100-----------------
1101
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001102- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1103 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1104 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1105 with the -i option.
1106
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001107- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1108 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1109
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001110- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1111 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1112
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001113- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1114 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1115 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1116 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1117 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1118 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1119 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1120 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1121 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1122 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1123 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1124 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1125 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001126
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001127- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1128 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1129 embedded in a lambda expression.
1130
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001131- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1132 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1133 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1134 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1135 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1136
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001137- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1138 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1139 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1140
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001141- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1142 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1143
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001144- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1145 It's writable again.
1146
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001147- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1148 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1149 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001150 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001151
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001152- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1153 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1154 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1155
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001156Extension modules
1157-----------------
1158
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001159- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1160 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1161
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001162- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1163 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1164 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1165 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1166
1167- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1168 collection.
1169
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001170- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1171 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1172 unique within a single program run.
1173
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001174- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1175 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1176
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001177- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1178 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1179
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001180- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1181 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001182
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001183- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1184
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001185- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1186 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1187
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001188- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1189 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1190 for many BSD-derived systems.
1191
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001192
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001193Library
1194-------
1195
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001196- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1197 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1198 primary ones:
1199
1200 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1201 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1202 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1203
1204 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1205 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1206 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1207 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1208 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1209 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1210
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001211- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1212 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1213 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1214 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1215 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1216 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1217 argument.
1218
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001219- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1220 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1221 in the archive.
1222
1223- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1224 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1225
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001226- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1227 569574).
1228
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001229- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1230 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1231 no more.
1232
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001233- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1234 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1235 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1236 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1237 code coverage.
1238
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001239- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1240 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1241 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001242 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1243 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001244
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001245- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1246 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1247 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001248 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001249
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001250- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1251
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001252- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1253 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1254 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1255 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1256
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001257- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1258 handling.
1259
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001260- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1261 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1262
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001263- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1264 in socket.py.
1265
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001266- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1267
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001268- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1269 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1270 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1271 opener with proxy support.
1272
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001273- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1274
1275- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1276
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001277Tools/Demos
1278-----------
1279
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001280- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1281
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001282- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1283
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001284- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1285 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001286
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001287- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1288 files.
1289
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001290Build
1291-----
1292
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001293- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001294 different root directory.
1295
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001296C API
1297-----
1298
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001299- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1300 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1301 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1302 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1303 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1304 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1305 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1306 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1307 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1308 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1309
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001310- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1311 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1312 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1313 from Python.
1314
1315
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001316New platforms
1317-------------
1318
1319None this time.
1320
1321Tests
1322-----
1323
1324- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1325 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1326
1327Windows
1328-------
1329
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001330- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1331
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001332- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1333 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1334 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1335 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1336 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1337 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1338 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1339 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1340 that's what it's for.
1341
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001342Mac
1343---
1344
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001345- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1346 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1347 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1348 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001349- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1350 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1351- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001352
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001353SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1354------------------------------------
1355
1356430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1357598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1358622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1359661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1360683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1361697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1362713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1363724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1364727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1365729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1366730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1367731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1368732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1369733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1370735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1371740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1372744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1373745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1374747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1375749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1376751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1377753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1378755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1379757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1380760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1381
1382
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001383What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1384================================
1385
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001386*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001387
1388Core and builtins
1389-----------------
1390
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001391- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1392 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1393
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001394- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1395 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1396 and cannot be strings).
1397
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001398- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1399 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1400 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1401 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1402
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001403- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1404 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1405 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1406 Python itself.
1407
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001408- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1409 the referenced object, if it has one.
1410
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001411- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1412 the thread started at
1413 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1414
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001415- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1416 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1417 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1418 placed on a list index.
1419
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001420- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1421 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1422 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1423 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1424
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001425- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1426 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1427 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1428 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1429 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1430 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1431 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1432
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001433- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1434 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1435 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1436 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1437 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1438
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001439- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1440 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001441
1442- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1443 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1444 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1445 #693195.)
1446
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001447- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1448 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001449
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001450- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001451 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001452 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1453 interpreter executions, would fail.
1454
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001455- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001456 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001457 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001458
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001459Extension modules
1460-----------------
1461
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001462- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1463 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1464 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1465 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1466
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001467- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1468 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1469
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001470- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1471 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1472 and Greg Chapman.)
1473
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001474- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1475 recursively.
1476
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001477- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001478 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1479 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1480 leaks.
1481
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001482- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1483
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001484- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1485 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1486 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1487 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1488 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1489 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1490 #705836.
1491
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001492- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001493 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1494
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001495- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1496 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1497 See SF bug #692416.
1498
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001499- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1500 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1501
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001502- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1503 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1504 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001505
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001506- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001507 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1508 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1509
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001510- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1511 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1512 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1513 timeouts to work properly.
1514
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001515Library
1516-------
1517
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001518- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1519 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1520 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1521 future release.
1522
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001523- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1524 for querying platform dependent features.
1525
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001526- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001527
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001528- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1529 pickle protocol versions.
1530
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001531- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1532 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1533 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1534
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001535- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1536
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001537- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1538 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1539 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1540 modules.
1541
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001542- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1543 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1544 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1545
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001546- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1547 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1548
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001549- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1550 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1551 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1552
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001553- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001554 MS Office extensions.
1555
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001556- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1557 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1558
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001559- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1560 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1561
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001562- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1563 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1564 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1565 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1566 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1567 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1568
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001569- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1570 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1571 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001572
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001573- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1574 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1575 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1576
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001577- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1578
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001579- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1580 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1581 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1582
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001583Tools/Demos
1584-----------
1585
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001586- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1587 See the module docstring for details.
1588
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001589Build
1590-----
1591
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001592- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1593 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001594
1595C API
1596-----
1597
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001598- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1599
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001600- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1601 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1602 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1603
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001604- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1605 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001606
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001607 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1608 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1609 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001610
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001611- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001612 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1613
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001614- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1615 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1616 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001617
1618New platforms
1619-------------
1620
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001621None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001622
1623Tests
1624-----
1625
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001626- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1627 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001628
1629Windows
1630-------
1631
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001632- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1633 function.
1634
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001635- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1636 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001637
1638Mac
1639---
1640
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001641- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1642 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001643
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001644- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1645 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001646
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001647- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1648 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1649 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001650
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001651- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001652 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1653 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001654
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001655- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1656 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001657
1658
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001659What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1660=================================
1661
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001662*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001663
1664Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001665-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001666
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001667- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1668 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1669 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1670
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001671- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1672 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1673 (SF patch #664376.)
1674
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001675- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1676 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1677 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1678 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1679 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1680 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001681 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001682
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001683- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1684 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1685 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1686 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001687 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001688
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001689- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1690 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1691 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1692 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1693 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1694 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1695 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1696 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1697 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1698 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1699 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1700
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001701- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1702 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1703 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1704 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1705 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1706 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1707
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001708- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1709 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1710
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001711- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1712 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1713 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1714 case.)
1715
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001716- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1717 passed as unicode strings.
1718
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001719- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1720 See SF bug #683467.
1721
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001722- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1723 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1724
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001725- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1726
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001727- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1728
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001729- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1730 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1731 arguments.
1732
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001733- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1734 See SF bug #667147.
1735
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001736- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001737 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001738 See SF bug #676155.
1739
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001740- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001741 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001742 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1743 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1744 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1745 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1746 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1747 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001748
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001749Extension modules
1750-----------------
1751
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001752- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1753 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1754 tp_as_number pointer.
1755
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001756- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1757 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1758 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1759 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1760 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1761
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001762- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1763
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001764- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1765
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001766- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001767 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001768 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1769 patch #678531.)
1770
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001771- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1772 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1773
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001774- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1775 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1776
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001777- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1778
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001779- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1780 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1781 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1782
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001783- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1784
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001785- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1786 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1787
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001788- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001789
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001790- datetime changes:
1791
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001792 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1793
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001794 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1795 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1796 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1797 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1798 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1799 now.
1800
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001801 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001802 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1803 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001804
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001805 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001806 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001807 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1808 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1809 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1810 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001811
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001812 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1813 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1814 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001815 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1816
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001817 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1818 by a later example coded by Guido.
1819
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001820 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001821 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1822 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1823 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001824 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1825 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1826
1827 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1828 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1829 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1830 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1831 tzinfo subclass instance.
1832
1833 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1834 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1835 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1836 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1837 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1838 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1839 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1840 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001841
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001842 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1843 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1844 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1845 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1846 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001847 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1848
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001849 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001850
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001851 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1852 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1853 as a naive datetime object.
1854
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001855 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1856 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1857 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1858
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001859 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1860 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1861 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1862 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1863 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1864 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1865 comparison.
1866
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001867 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1868 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1869 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1870 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001871 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001872
1873 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001874
1875 and ::
1876
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001877 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1878
1879 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1880 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1881 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1882 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1883
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001884 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1885 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1886 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1887 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1888 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1889
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001890 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1891 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001892 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1893 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001894
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001895Library
1896-------
1897
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001898- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1899 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1900
1901- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1902 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1903 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1904 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1905 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1906 See PEP 307 for details.
1907
1908- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1909 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1910
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001911- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1912 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001913 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001914 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1915 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001916 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001917
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001918- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1919 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1920
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001921- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1922 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1923 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1924
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001925- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1926
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001927- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1928 exception.
1929
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001930- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1931 class.
1932
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001933- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1934 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1935 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1936
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001937- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1938 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1939
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001940- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001941 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1942 See SF bug #659228.
1943
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001944- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1945 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1946 See SF patch #651082.
1947
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001948- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001949
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001950- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1951 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1952
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001953- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001954 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001955
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001956- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1957 DOS paths from other platforms.
1958
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001959Tools/Demos
1960-----------
1961
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001962- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1963 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1964 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1965 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1966 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1967 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1968 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1969 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1970 example:
1971
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001972 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1973 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001974
1975 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1976
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001977
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001978Build
1979-----
1980
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001981- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1982 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1983 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001984 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1985
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001986 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1987
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001988- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1989 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1990 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1991 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1992 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1993 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1994 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1995 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1996 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1997
1998- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1999 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2000 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2001 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2002
2003- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2004 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2005
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002006C API
2007-----
2008
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002009- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2010 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002011
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002012- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2013 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2014 tp_as_number pointer.
2015
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002016- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2017 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2018 (SF #681367)
2019
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002020- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2021 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2022 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2023 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002024
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002025Tests
2026-----
2027
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002028- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002029 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2030 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2031 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2032 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2033 pydoc.)
2034
2035- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2036
2037- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002038
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002039Windows
2040-------
2041
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002042- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2043 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2044 time).
2045
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002046- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2047 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2048
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002049- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2050 release without strong cryptography.
2051
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002052- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002053 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002054
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002055- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2056 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2057
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002058Mac
2059---
2060
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002061- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2062 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002063
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002064- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2065 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2066 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002067
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002068- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2069 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002070
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002071- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2072 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2073 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2074 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002075
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002076- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002077 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2078 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2079 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002080
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002081
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002082What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002083=================================
2084
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002085*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002086
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002087Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002088--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002089
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002090- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2091
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002092- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2093 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002094 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002095 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002096 a different meaning than before.
2097
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002098- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002099 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002100 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002101
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002102- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002103 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002104 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002105
2106- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2107 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2108 and deallocation.
2109
2110- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2111 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2112
2113- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2114 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2115 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2116 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2117 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2118
2119- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2120 now detected by the garbage collector.
2121
2122- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2123 [SF bug 519621]
2124
2125- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2126 identifier.
2127
2128- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2129 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2130 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2131 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2132 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2133 [SF bug 563060]
2134
2135- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2136 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2137 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2138 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2139 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2140
2141- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2142 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2143 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2144
2145- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2146
2147- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2148 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2149 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2150 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2151 state of the slots would be lost.)
2152
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002153Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002154-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002155
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002156- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002157 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2158 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2159 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2160 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002161 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2162 Jython 2.1.
2163
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002164- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002165 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002166 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2167 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2168 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2169 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2170 these, see PEP 302.
2171
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002172- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2173 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2174 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2175
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002176- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2177 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2178 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2179
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002180- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2181 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2182 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2183
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002184- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2185 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2186 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2187 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2188 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2189 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2190 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2191 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2192 releases or implementations.
2193
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002194- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002195 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2196 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002197
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002198- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2199 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2200
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002201- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2202 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2203 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2204
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002205- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2206 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2207
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002208- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2209 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002210 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2211 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002212
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002213- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2214 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2215 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2216 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2217 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2218
2219 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2220 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2221 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2222 pattern.
2223
2224 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2225 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2226 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2227 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2228
2229 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2230 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2231 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2232 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2233 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2234 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2235
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002236- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2237 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2238 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2239 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2240 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2241 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2242 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2243 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002244
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002245- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2246 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2247 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2248 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2249 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002250 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2251 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2252 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2253 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2254 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2255 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2256 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002257
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002258- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2259 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2260
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002261- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2262 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2263 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2264 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2265 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2266 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2267 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2268 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2269 to Zack Weinberg!
2270
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002271- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2272 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2273 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2274 type. This has been fixed now.
2275
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002276- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2277 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2278 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2279
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002280- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2281 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2282 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2283 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2284 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2285 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2286 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2287 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002288 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002289
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002290- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2291 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2292 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002293
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002294- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2295 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2296 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2297 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2298 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2299 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2300 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2301 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002302 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002303 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2304 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2305
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002306- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2307 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2308 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2309 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2310 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2311 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2312 this.)
2313
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002314- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2315 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002316 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002317 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002318 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2319 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002320 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2321 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002322
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002323- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2324 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2325 currently running.
2326
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002327- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2328 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2329 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2330 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2331
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002332- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2333 as directory names.
2334
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002335- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2336 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2337
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002338- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2339 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2340
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002341- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002342 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2343 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002344
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002345- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2346 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2347 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2348 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2349 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2350
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002351- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2352 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2353 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2354 removed.
2355
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002356- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2357 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2358 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2359
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002360- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2361 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2362 to __debug__.
2363
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002364- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2365 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2366 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2367
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002368- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2369 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2370 deprecated now.
2371
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002372- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2373 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2374 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002375
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002376- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2377 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2378 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2379 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2380 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002381
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002382- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2383 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2384
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002385- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2386 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2387 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002388 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002389 is backward compatible.
2390
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002391- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2392 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2393 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2394 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2395 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2396
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002397- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2398 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2399 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2400 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2401 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2402 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002403
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002404- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2405 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2406
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002407- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2408 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2409
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002410- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2411 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2412 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2413 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2414 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2415
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002416- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2417 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2418 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2419
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002420- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002421 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2422
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002423- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2424 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2425 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002426
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002427- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2428 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2429
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002430- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2431 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2432 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2433
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002434- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2435
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002436Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002437-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002438
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002439- Added three operators to the operator module:
2440 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2441 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2442 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2443
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002444- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2445
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002446- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2447 archives.
2448
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002449- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2450 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2451 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2452
2453 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2454
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002455- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2456 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2457 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002458 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002459
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002460- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2461 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2462 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2463 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002464 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2465 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2466 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2467 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002468
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002469- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2470 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002471
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002472- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2473
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002474- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2475 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2476
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002477- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2478 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2479 supported.
2480
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002481- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2482
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002483- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2484 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002485
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002486- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2487 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2488
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002489- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2490
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002491- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2492 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2493
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002494- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2495 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2496 functions but callable type objects.
2497
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002498- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002499 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002500 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002501
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002502- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2503 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002504
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002505- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2506 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002507
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002508- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2509 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2510 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2511 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2512
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002513- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2514 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002515
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002516- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2517 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2518 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2519 and __imul__.
2520
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002521- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002522 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2523 is called.
2524
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002525- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2526 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2527 interpreter was compiled.
2528
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002529- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2530 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2531 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002532 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002533 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2534 1, not 2.
2535
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002536- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2537 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2538 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2539 limit.
2540
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002541- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2542 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2543 bug #623464.
2544
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002545- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2546 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2547 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2548 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2549
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002550Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002551-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002552
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002553- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2554
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002555- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2556 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2557 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2558 with Python 2.3a2.
2559
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002560- os.path exposes getctime.
2561
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002562- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002563 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002564 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002565 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002566 unit tests of floating point results.
2567
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002568- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2569 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2570 has been increased.
2571
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002572- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2573 executed.
2574
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002575- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2576 postinstallation script.
2577
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002578- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2579 test the current module.
2580
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002581- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002582 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2583 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2584 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2585 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2586
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002587- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002588 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002589 Ward's Optik package.
2590
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002591- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2592 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2593 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2594 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2595
2596- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2597 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002598 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002599
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002600- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2601 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2602 shelf are binary pickles.
2603
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002604- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2605 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2606
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002607- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2608 modules are iterators now.
2609
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002610- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2611 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2612 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2613 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2614 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2615 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002616
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002617- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2618 with their entity value.
2619
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002620- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2621
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002622- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2623 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002624
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002625- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2626 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002627 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002628
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002629- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2630 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2631 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2632 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2633 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2634 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2635 main():
2636
2637 import locale
2638 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2639
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002640- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2641 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2642
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002643- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2644 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2645 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2646 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2647 to the new standard.
2648
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002649- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2650 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2651 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2652 an extension to the database.
2653
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002654- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2655 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2656 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2657 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002658 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002659
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002660- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002661 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002662
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002663- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2664 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2665 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2666 bounded integers.
2667
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002668- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2669 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2670 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2671 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2672 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2673 in existence.
2674
2675 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2676 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2677 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2678 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2679 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2680 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2681
2682 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2683 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2684 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2685 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2686
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002687- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2688 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2689 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2690
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002691- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2692
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002693- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2694 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2695 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2696 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2697
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002698- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2699 argument.
2700
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002701- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2702 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2703 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2704 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2705 [SF patch 560794].
2706
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002707- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2708 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2709 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002710 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2711 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2712 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002713
2714- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2715 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002716
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002717- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2718 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2719 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2720 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002721
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002722- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2723 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2724 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2725 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2726 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2727
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002728- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002729
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002730- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2731
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002732- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2733 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2734 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2735 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2736 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2737 identical to None.
2738
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002739- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2740 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2741 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2742 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2743 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2744 results now.
2745
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002746- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2747 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2748
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002749- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2750 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2751 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2752 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2753 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2754 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2755 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2756 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2757
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002758- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2759
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002760- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2761 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2762
2763- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2764 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2765 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2766 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2767 and other systems.
2768
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002769- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2770 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2771 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2772 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 +00002773 work well with these.
2774
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002775- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2776
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002777- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002778 connections.
2779
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002780- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2781 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2782 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2783
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002784- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2785 sets
2786
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002787- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2788 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2789 name.
2790
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002791- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2792 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2793 passed in.
2794
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002795- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002796 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002797 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2798 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002799
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002800- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2801
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002802- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2803
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002804- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2805 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2806 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2807
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002808- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2809 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2810 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2811 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002812 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002813
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002814- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002815 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002816 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002817
2818- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2819 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2820 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2821
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002822- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002823 the value of its expression argument.
2824
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002825- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2826 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2827 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2828
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002829- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2830 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2831 skipstone browser was included.
2832
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002833- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2834 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2835
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002836Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002837-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002838
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002839- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2840 names in addition to accepting file names.
2841
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002842- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2843 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2844 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2845 still used and useful.)
2846
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002847- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2848 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2849 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2850 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002851
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002852- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2853 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2854 the generated binary.
2855
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002856Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002857-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002858
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002859- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2860
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002861- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2862 except in the hands of experts.
2863
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002864- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002865 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2866 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2867 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002868
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002869- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2870 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2871 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2872 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2873 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2874 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2875 builds.
2876
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002877- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2878 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2879 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2880 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2881 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2882 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2883 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2884 new type.
2885
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002886- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002887
2888 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2889 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2890 positive infinities.
2891
2892 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2893 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2894 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2895 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2896 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2897 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2898 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2899
2900 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2901
2902 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2903
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002904- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2905 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2906 size of the executable.
2907
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002908- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2909 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2910 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2911 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002912
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002913- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2914
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002915- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2916 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2917 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002918
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002919- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2920 well as Unix.
2921
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002922- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2923 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2924 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2925 modules in the README file for details.
2926
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002927C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002928-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002929
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002930- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2931 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002932 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002933 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002934 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002935
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002936- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2937 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2938 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2939 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2940 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2941 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002942 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002943 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2944 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2945 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2946 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2947 aligned.)
2948
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002949- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2950 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2951 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2952
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002953- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2954 level.
2955
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002956- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2957 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2958 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2959 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2960 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2961
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002962- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2963 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2964 code.
2965
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002966- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2967 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2968 adjusting for negative indices.
2969
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002970- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2971 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2972 object.
2973
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002974- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2975 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2976 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2977
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002978- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2979 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002980
2981- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2982
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002983- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2984 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2985 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2986 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2987
2988- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2989
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002990- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002991
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002992- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002993 without going through the buffer API.
2994
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002995- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002996
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002997- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2998 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2999 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3000 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3001
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003002- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3003 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3004
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003005- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003006 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3007
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003008New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003009-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003010
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003011- OpenVMS is now supported.
3012
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003013- AtheOS is now supported.
3014
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003015- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3016
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003017- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3018
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003019Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003020-----
3021
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003022- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3023 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3024 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003025
3026Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003027-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003028
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003029- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3030 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3031 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3032 bugs.
3033 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003034 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003035 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3036 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003037 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003038
3039- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003040 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003041
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003042- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3043 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3044
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003045- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3046 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003047 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003048 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3049
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003050- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3051 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3052 use files" uninstall option).
3053
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003054- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3055
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003056- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3057 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3058
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003059- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3060 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3061 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3062
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003063- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3064 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3065 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3066 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3067 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003068 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3069 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3070 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003071
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003072- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003073 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003074 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3075 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3076 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3077 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3078 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3079 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3080 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3081 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3082 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3083 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3084 work around.
3085
3086- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3087 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3088 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3089 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3090 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3091 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3092 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3093 specified with O_CREAT too).
3094
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003095Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003096----
3097
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003098- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003099
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003100- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3101 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3102 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3103
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003104- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3105 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3106 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3107
3108- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3109 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3110 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3111 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3112 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3113 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3114 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3115 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003116
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003117- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3118 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3119 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003120
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003121- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3122 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3123 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3124 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3125 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003126
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003127- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3128 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3129 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003130
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003131- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3132 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003133
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003134- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3135 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3136 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3137 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3138 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003139
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003140- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3141 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3142 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3143
3144- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3145 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3146 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003147
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003148- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3149 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3150 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3151 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003152 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003153
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003154- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3155 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003156
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003157- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3158 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003159
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003160- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003161 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003162 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3163 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003164
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003165
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003166What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003167===============================
3168
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003169*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3170
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003171Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003172--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003173
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003174- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3175 with a custom metaclass.
3176
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003177Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003178-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003179
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003180- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3181 are proxies.
3182
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003183Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003184-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003185
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003186- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3187 very short strings.
3188
3189- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3190 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3191 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3192 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3193 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3194
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003195Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003196-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003197
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003198- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3199 close or delete time).
3200
3201- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3202 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3203
3204- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3205
3206- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003207 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003208
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003209Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003210-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003211
3212Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003213-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003214
3215C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003216-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003217
3218New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003219-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003220
3221Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003222-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003223
3224Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003225-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003226
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003227- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3228
3229- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3230 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3231
3232- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3233 deleted at process exit time.
3234
3235- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3236 in backslash.
3237
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003238Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003239----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003240
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003241- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3242 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3243 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3244
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003245
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003246What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003247===========================
3248
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003249*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3250
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003251Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003252--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003253
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003254- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3255 been extensively updated. See
3256
3257 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3258
3259 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3260
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003261- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3262 deleted!
3263
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003264- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3265 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3266 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3267 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3268 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3269
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003270- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3271
3272 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3273 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3274
3275 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3276 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3277 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3278 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3279 supported anyway.
3280
3281 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3282 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3283
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003284- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3285 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3286 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3287 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3288 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003289
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003290- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3291 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3292 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3293
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003294Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003295-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003296
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003297- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3298 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3299 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3300 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3301 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3302 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003303 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3304 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3305 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3306 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003307
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003308- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3309 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3310 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3311
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003312Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003313-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003314
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003315- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3316
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003317Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003318-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003319
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003320- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3321 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3322 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3323 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3324 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3325 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3326
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003327- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3328
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003329- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3330
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003331- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3332
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003333- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3334 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3335 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3336
3337- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3338
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003339Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003340-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003341
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003342- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3343 off a search on Google.
3344
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003345Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003346-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003347
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003348- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3349 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3350 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3351 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3352 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3353 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3354 other platforms should do likewise.
3355
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003356- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3357 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3358 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3359
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003360C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003361-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003362
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003363- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3364 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3365 producing key-value pairs.
3366
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003367- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003368 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003369 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3370 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3371 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3372 previously went unchallenged.
3373
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003374New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003375-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003376
3377Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003378-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003379
3380Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003381-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003382
3383Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003384----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003385
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003386- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3387 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003388
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003389- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3390 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3391 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3392 home.
3393
3394
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003395What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003396===========================
3397
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003398*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3399
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003400Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003401--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003402
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003403- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3404 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003405
3406 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003407 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003408
3409 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3410 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003411 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003412 This needs to be documented.
3413
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003414- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3415 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3416
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003417- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3418 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3419 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3420
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003421- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3422 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3423
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003424- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3425 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3426 class forbids it).
3427
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003428- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3429 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3430 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3431
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003432- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3433
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003434Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003435-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003436
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003437- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3438 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003439 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003440
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003441- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3442 (like 1 + '').
3443
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003444Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003445-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003446
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003447- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3448 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3449 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3450 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003451 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003452 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3453
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003454- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3455 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3456 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3457 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3458
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003459- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3460 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003461 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3462 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3463 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003464
3465- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3466 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003467
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003468- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3469 bytes on its input.
3470
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003471Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003472-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003473
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003474- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003475 convenience function.
3476
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003477- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3478 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3479 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003480 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3481 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3482 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3483 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3484 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3485 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003486
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003487- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3488 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3489 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3490 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3491
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003492- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3493 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3494 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3495
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003496- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3497 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3498 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3499 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3500
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003501- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3502 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003503 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003504 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3505 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3506 new -l and -e options.
3507
3508- statcache is now deprecated.
3509
3510- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3511 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003512 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003513 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3514 time properly taken into account.
3515
3516- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3517 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3518 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3519 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3520
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003521Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003522-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003523
3524Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003525-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003526
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003527- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3528 is built with libdb3 if available.
3529
3530- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3531
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003532C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003533-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003534
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003535- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3536 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3537 PySequence_Size().
3538
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003539- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3540
3541- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3542 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3543 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3544
3545- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3546 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3547
3548- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3549 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3550
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003551New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003552-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003553
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003554- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3555 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3556
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003557- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3558 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3559
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003560- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3561
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003562Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003563-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003564
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003565- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3566 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3567
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003568Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003569-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003570
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003571Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003572----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003573
3574- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3575 removed completely in the next release.
3576
3577- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3578 OSX.
3579
3580- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3581 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3582
3583- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3584
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003585
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003586What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003587===========================
3588
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003589*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3590
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003591Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003592--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003593
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003594- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003595 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003596 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003597 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3598 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003599 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3600 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003601 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3602 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003603
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003604- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3605 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3606
3607- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3608 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3609
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003610Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003611-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003612
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003613- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3614 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3615 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3616 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3617 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3618 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3619 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3620 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3621
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003622- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3623 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3624 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3625 example).
3626
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003627- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003628 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003629 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003630 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003631
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003632- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3633 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3634 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003635 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003636
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003637- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3638 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3639 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3640 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3641 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3642 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3643
3644 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3645
3646 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3647
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003648Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003649-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003650
3651- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3652
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003653- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3654
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003655- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3656 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003657
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003658- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3659 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3660 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3661 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3662 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3663 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003664 attributes.
3665
3666- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3667 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3668 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003669
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003670- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3671 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3672 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003673
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003674- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3675 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3676 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003677 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3678 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3679
3680- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3681 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003682
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003683Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003684-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003685
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003686- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3687 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3688
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003689- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3690 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3691 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3692 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3693
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003694- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3695 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3696 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3697 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3698
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003699 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3700 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3701 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3702 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3703 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3704 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3705 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3706 without losing information).
3707
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003708- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003709 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3710 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3711 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3712 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3713 module).
3714
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003715 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003716 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3717 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3718 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3719 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003720
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003721- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003722 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3723 encoding.
3724
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003725- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3726 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3727
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003728- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003729 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3730
3731- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3732 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3733 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3734 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3735
3736- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3737
3738- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3739 ON, and OFF.
3740
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003741- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3742 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3743
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003744Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003745-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003746
3747- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3748 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3749 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003750
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003751- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3752 been added: -X and -E.
3753
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003754Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003755-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003756
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003757- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3758 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3759
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003760C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003761-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003762
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003763- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3764 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3765 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3766 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3767 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3768
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003769- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3770 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3771 as long) arguments.
3772
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003773- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3774 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3775 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3776 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3777 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3778 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3779
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003780- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3781 input.
3782
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003783New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003784-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003785
3786Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003787-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003788
3789Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003790-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003791
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003792- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3793 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3794 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3795
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003796- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3797 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3798 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003799 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003800
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003801 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3802 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3803 import signal
3804 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003805
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003806 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003807 while 1:
3808 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003809 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003810 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3811 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3812 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3813 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003814
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003815
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003816What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3817===========================
3818
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003819*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3820
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003821Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003822--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003823
3824- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3825 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3826 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3827
3828- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3829 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3830 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3831 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3832 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3833 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3834 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003835
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003836- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003837 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003838 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3839 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3840 associate a docstring with a property.
3841
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003842- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3843 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3844 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3845 other built-in object types.
3846
3847- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3848 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3849 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3850 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3851 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3852
3853- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3854 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3855
3856- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3857 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003858 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003859 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3860 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3861 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3862 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3863 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3864
3865- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3866 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3867 class.
3868
3869- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3870 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3871 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3872 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3873
3874- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3875 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3876 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3877 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3878
3879- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3880 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3881
3882- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3883 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3884 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3885 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3886 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003887 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003888 with the same value as s.
3889
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003890- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3891
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003892Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003893----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003894
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003895- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3896
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003897- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3898 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3899 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3900 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3901 objects.
3902
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003903- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3904 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003905 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3906 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3907
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003908- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3909 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3910 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3911
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003912Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003913-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003914
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003915- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3916 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3917 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3918 by the instances.
3919
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003920- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3921 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3922 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3923
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003924- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3925 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3926 before the entire comparison is complete.
3927
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003928- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3929 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3930 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3931
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003932- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3933 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3934 getwriter().
3935
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003936- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3937 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3938
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003939- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003940 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3941 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3942
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003943- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3944 iterable object.
3945
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003946- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3947 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003948
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003949- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3950 authentication.
3951
3952- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3953 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003954
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003955- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003956 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3957 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3958 a sample driver.)
3959
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003960Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003961-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003962
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003963- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3964 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3965 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3966 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3967 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3968 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3969 kernel has large file support.
3970
3971- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3972 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3973 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3974 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3975 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3976
3977- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3978 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3979 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3980
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003981C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003982-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003983
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003984- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3985 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3986
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003987New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003988-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003989
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003990- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3991 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3992
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003993Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003994-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003995
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003996- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3997 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3998 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3999 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4000 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4001
4002- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4003 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4004 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4005 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4006
4007- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4008 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4009
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004010Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004011-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004012
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004013- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004014 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4015 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004016
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004017
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004018What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4019===========================
4020
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004021*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4022
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004023Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004024----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004025
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004026- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4027 big to represent as a C double.
4028
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004029- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4030 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4031 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4032 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4033 restriction).
4034
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004035- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4036 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4037 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4038 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4039 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4040
4041 >>> dir([])
4042 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4043 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4044 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4045 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4046 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4047 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4048 'reverse', 'sort']
4049
4050 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4051
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004052- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004053 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4054 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4055 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4056 OverflowError exception.
4057
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004058- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004059 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004060 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4061 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4062 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4063 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4064 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004065 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004066 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4067 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4068
4069 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4070 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4071 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4072 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004073
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004074- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004075 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4076 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4077 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4078 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4079 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4080 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4081 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4082 once it is created.
4083
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004084- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4085 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4086 (key, value) pairs.
4087
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004088- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004089 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4090 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4091
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004092- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4093 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4094 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4095 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4096 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004097
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004098- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004099 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4100 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4101
4102 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4103
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004104- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004105 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4106
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004107Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004108-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004109
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004110- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004111 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4112 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004113
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004114- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4115 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4116 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4117 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4118 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4119 in this area anymore).
4120
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004121- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4122 threading.Timer.
4123
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004124- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4125 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4126
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004127- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004128 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4129
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004130- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004131 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4132 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4133 converted to Python longs.
4134
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004135- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004136 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4137
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004138- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4139 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4140 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4141
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004142Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004143-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004144
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004145- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4146 division operators as per PEP 238.
4147
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004148Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004149-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004150
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004151- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4152 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4153 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4154 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4155
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004156C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004157-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004158
4159- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004160
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004161- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4162 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004163 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004164
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004165 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4166 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004167 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004168 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004169
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004170- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004171 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4172 module:
4173
4174 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004175
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004176 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4177 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004178
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004179 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4180 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004181
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004182 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4183
4184 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4185
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004186- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004187 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4188 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4189 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004190
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004191New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004192-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004193
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004194- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4195 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4196 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4197 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4198 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004199
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004200Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004201-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004202
4203Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004204-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004205
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004206- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4207 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4208 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4209 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004210 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4211 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4212 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4213 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4214 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004215
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004216- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004217 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4218
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004219
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004220What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4221===========================
4222
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004223*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4224
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004225Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004226-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004227
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004228- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4229 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4230
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004231- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4232 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4233 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004234
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004235- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4236 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4237 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4238 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004239
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004240- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4241
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004242- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004243
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004244Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004245-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004246
4247- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004248 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004249 the module docstring for details.
4250
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004251Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004252-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004253
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004254- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004255 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4256 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4257 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004258
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004259- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4260 Nick Mathewson.
4261
4262Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004263----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004264
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004265- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4266 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4267 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4268 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4269 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4270 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4271 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4272 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4273
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004274- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4275 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4276 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4277 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4278
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004279- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4280 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4281 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4282 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4283 come a long way).
4284
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004285- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4286 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4287 write filters for these warnings).
4288
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004289- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4290 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4291 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4292 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4293 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4294
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004295- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4296 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4297 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4298 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4299 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4300 older distribution.
4301
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004302Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004303-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004304
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004305- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4306 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004307 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004308
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004309- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4310 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4311 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4312
4313- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4314
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004315- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4316
4317- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4318
4319- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4320
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004321- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004322
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004323- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4324
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004325New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004326-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004327
4328C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004329-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004330
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004331- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4332 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4333 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4334 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4335 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4336 against buffer overruns.
4337
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004338- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004339 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4340 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004341 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4342 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4343 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4344
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004345- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4346 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4347 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4348 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4349 deprecated.
4350
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004351Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004352-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004353
4354- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4355 relevant is found.
4356
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004357
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004358What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004359===========================
4360
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004361*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4362
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004363Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004364----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004365
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004366- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4367 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4368 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4369 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4370 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4371 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4372 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4373 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004374 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004375 repaired.
4376
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004377- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004378 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004379 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4380 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4381 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4382 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4383 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4384 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4385 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4386 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4387
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004388- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4389 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4390 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4391 leading BMO character).
4392
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004393- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4394 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4395 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4396
4397 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4398 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4399 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004400
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004401 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4402 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4403 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4404 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4405 for various simple to use conversions.
4406
4407 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4408 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4409
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004410 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4411 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4412 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4413 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4414 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4415 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4416 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4417 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4418 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4419 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4420 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4421 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4422 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4423 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4424 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004425
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004426- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4427 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4428 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004429 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004430 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004431
4432 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004433 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4434 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4435 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4436 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4437 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004438 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4439 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004440
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004441 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4442 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4443 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004444 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004445
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004446- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4447 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4448 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4449 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4450 floating arithmetic,
4451
4452 x = 9007199254740992.0
4453 print long(x)
4454
4455 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4456 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4457 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4458 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4459 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4460 functions are of good quality).
4461
4462 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4463 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4464 algorithms to break.
4465
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004466- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4467 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4468 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4469 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4470 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4471 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4472 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4473 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4474 order.
4475
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004476- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4477 operation along the most common code paths.
4478
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004479- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4480 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4481
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004482- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4483 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4484 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4485 {}.update(UserDict())
4486
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004487- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4488 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4489 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4490 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4491 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4492 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4493 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4494 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4495
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004496- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004497 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004498
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004499 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004500 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4501 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004502 join() method of strings
4503 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004504 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4505 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004506 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004507 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004508
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004509- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4510 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4511
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004512- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4513 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4514
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004515- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4516 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4517 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4518 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4519
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004520- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4521 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004522 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004523 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4524 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004525
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004526- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4527
4528
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004529Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004530-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004531
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004532- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004533 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004534 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4535 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4536
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004537- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4538 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4539
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004540- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4541 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4542 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4543 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4544
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004545- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4546 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4547 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4548
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004549- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4550
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004551- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4552
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004553- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4554 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4555 that are still imported into string.py).
4556
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004557- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4558
4559- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4560 Now it does.
4561
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004562- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4563
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004564- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4565 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4566 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4567 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4568 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004569 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4570 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004571
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004572- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4573 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4574 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4575 'help(object)'.
4576
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004577Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004578-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004579
4580- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004581 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004582 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4583 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4584
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004585- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004586 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4587 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004588
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004589C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004590-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004591
4592- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4593 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004594
4595----
4596
4597**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**