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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
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +000015- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
16 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
17
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000018- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000019 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000020
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000021- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000022 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000023 which was missing for no apparent reason.
24
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000025- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000026 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
27 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
28
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000029- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
30 types that support garbage collection.
31
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000032- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
33
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +000034- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
35 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
36 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
37 Jython.
38
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +000039- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
40
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000041Extension modules
42-----------------
43
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +000044- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
45
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000046Library
47-------
48
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +000049- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
50 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
51 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
52
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +000053- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
54
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +000055- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
56 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
57
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +000058- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
59 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
60 when dummy_threading is being used.
61
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +000062- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
63 from a tarfile.
64
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000065- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +000066 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000067
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +000068- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
69 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
70 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
71 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
72
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +000073- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
74 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
75
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +000076- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
77 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
78 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
79 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
80 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
81 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
82 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
83 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
84 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
85 by some other method in progress).
86
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000087- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
88 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
89 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +000090
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +000091- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
92
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +000093- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
94 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
95 AM Kuchling.
96
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +000097- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
98 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
99 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
100
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000101- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
102 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
103 instead of unsigned.
104
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000105- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000106 no longer part of the public API.
107
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000108- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
109 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
110 string methods of the same name).
111
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000112- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
113 SF patch 982681.
114
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000115- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000116 SF patch 945642.
117
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000118- doctest unittest integration improvements:
119
120 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
121
122 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
123 DocTestSuites.
124
125- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
126 that provide thread-local data.
127
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000128- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
129 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
130
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000131- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
132
133- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
134 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
135 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
136
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000137- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
138
139 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
140 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
141 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
142
143 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
144 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
145 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
146 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
147
148 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
149 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
150
151 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
152 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
153 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
154 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
155
156 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
157 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
158 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
159 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
160 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
161
162 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
163 wrapping help output.
164
165 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
166 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
167 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000168
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000169Tools/Demos
170-----------
171
172Build
173-----
174
175C API
176-----
177
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000178- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
179 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
180
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000181Documentation
182-------------
183
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000184- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000185
186 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
187 assigning thier values
188
189 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
190
191 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
192
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000193- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000194
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000195New platforms
196-------------
197
198Tests
199-----
200
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000201- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000202 platforms that use the Makefile.
203
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000204- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
205 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
206 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
207
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000208Windows
209-------
210
211Mac
212---
213
214
215
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000216What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
217=================================
218
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000219*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000220
221Core and builtins
222-----------------
223
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000224- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
225 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
226 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
227 objects now (one object instead of three).
228
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000229- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
230 Windows DLLs.
231
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000232- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
233
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000234- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
235 a new .pyc magic.
236
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000237- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
238 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
239 be there.
240
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000241- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
242 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
243 the LC_NUMERIC category.
244
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000245- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
246 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
247 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
248
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000249- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
250
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000251- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
252 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
253 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000254
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000255- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
256 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
257
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000258- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
259
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000260- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000261 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000262
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000263- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
264
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000265- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
266
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000267- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
268 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
269
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000270- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
271 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
272 Fixes bug #858016 .
273
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000274- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
275 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
276 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
277
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000278- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
279 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
280 improves their performance (about 35%).
281
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000282- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
283 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
284 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
285
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000286- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
287 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
288 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
289 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
290
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000291- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
292 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
293 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
294 length is not known).
295
296- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
297 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000298 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
299 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000300 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
301
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000302- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
303 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
304
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000305- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
306 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
307 keyword arguments.
308
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000309- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
310 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
311 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
312
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000313- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
314 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
315 cases.
316
317- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
318 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
319 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
320 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
321 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
322 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
323 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
324 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
325 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
326 a release build.
327
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000328- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
329 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
330
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000331- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000332 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000333
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000334- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
335 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
336 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
337 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
338 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
339 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
340 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
341 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
342 destroyed.
343
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000344- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
345 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
346 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
347 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
348 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
349 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
350 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
351 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
352
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000353- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
354 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
355 character other than a space.
356
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000357- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
358 by the function object or by the method object, the function
359 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
360 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
361 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
362 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
363 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
364 attributes with the same name.
365
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000366- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
367 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
368 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
369 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
370 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
371 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
372 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
373 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
374 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
375 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
376 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
377 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
378 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
379 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000380
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000381- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
382 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
383 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
384 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
385 This has been repaired.
386
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000387- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
388
389- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
390
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000391- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
392 over a sequence.
393
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000394- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000395 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000396
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000397- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
398
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000399- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
400 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
401 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
402 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
403 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
404 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
405 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
406 records with equal keys is unchanged).
407
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000408- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
409 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
410 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
411
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000412- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
413 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
414 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
415 freelist.
416
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000417- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
418 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
419
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000420- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
421 number.
422
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000423- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
424 a TypeError exception.
425
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000426- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
427 820195.
428
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000429- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
430 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
431 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
432
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000433- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000434 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
435 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000436
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000437- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
438 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
439 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
440
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000441- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
442 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000443 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000444
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000445- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000446 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
447 the first call.
448
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000449
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000450Extension modules
451-----------------
452
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000453- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
454 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
455
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000456- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
457 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
458 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
459 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
460 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
461 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
462 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000463
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000464- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
465
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000466- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
467
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000468- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
469 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
470
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000471- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
472 fewer false positives.
473
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000474- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
475 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
476
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000477- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000478 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
479
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000480- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000481 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000482 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
483 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
484 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000485
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000486- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
487 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
488 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
489 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
490
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000491- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
492 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
493 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
494 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
495 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
496 #897625.
497
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000498- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
499 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
500
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000501- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
502 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
503 and pops on either side of the deque.
504
505- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
506 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
507
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000508- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
509 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
510 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
511 other functions that expect a function argument.
512
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000513- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
514
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000515- os.getsid was added.
516
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000517- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
518 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
519 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
520
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000521- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
522
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000523- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
524
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000525- readline.clear_history was added.
526
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000527- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
528
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000529- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
530
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000531- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
532
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000533- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
534
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000535- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
536
537- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
538
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000539- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
540
541- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
542
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000543- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
544 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
545 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
546
547- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
548 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
549 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
550 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
551 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
552 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
553 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
554
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000555- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
556 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
557 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
558 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000559
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000560- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000561 iterators from a single iterable.
562
563- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
564 of raising a TypeError exception.
565
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000566- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
567 as parameter.
568
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000569Library
570-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000571
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000572- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
573 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
574 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000575
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000576- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
577 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
578 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000579
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000580- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000581
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000582- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
583 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000584
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000585- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
586 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
587
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000588- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
589
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000590- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000591 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000592
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000593- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
594 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
595
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000596- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
597
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000598- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
599 on cygwin and mingw32.
600
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000601- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
602
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000603- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
604 module.
605
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000606- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
607 installation scheme for all platforms.
608
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000609- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000610 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000611
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000612- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
613 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
614 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
615
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000616- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
617 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
618 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
619
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000620- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
621
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000622- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
623
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000624- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
625 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
626
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000627- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
628 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
629 type pattern with the same value exists.
630
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000631- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
632 when run from the command prompt).
633
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000634- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
635 not taken into consideration when caching value.
636
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000637- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
638 default sort).
639
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000640- Added global runctx function to profile module
641
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000642- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
643
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000644- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
645
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000646- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
647
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000648- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000649 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
650 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
651 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
652 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
653 accordingly.
654
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000655- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
656 decoding standards.
657
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000658- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
659 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
660 called for all requests.
661
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000662- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
663 they are passed to the compiler.
664
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000665- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
666 indent, width and depth.
667
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000668- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
669 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
670
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000671- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
672 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
673
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000674- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
675
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000676- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
677
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000678- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
679
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000680- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
681 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
682
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000683- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000684 for better performance.
685
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000686- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000687
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000688- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
689 a string).
690
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000691- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
692
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000693- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
694
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000695- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
696
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000697- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
698
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000699- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
700 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
701 list of fieldnames.
702
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000703- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
704 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
705
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000706- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
707
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000708- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
709 empty lists.
710
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000711- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
712 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
713 and shelves.
714
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000715- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
716 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
717
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000718- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000719 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
720 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000721
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000722- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
723 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000724 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000725
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000726- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000727 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
728 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
729
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000730- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
731 and removed in Py2.4.
732
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000733- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
734
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000735- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
736
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000737Tools/Demos
738-----------
739
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000740- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
741 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
742
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000743- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
744
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000745- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
746 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
747 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
748 destination in situations where both files are given.
749
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000750- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
751 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
752 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
753 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
754
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000755- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
756
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000757- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
758 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
759 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
760 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
761 now.
762
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000763- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
764 in effect
765
766- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
767 C-c C-h
768
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000769- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
770 -d option was given.
771
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000772Build
773-----
774
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000775- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
776 build under OS X.
777
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000778- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
779 --enable-profiling.
780
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000781- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
782 is configured --with-tsc.
783
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000784- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
785 on AMD64.
786
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000787- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
788 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
789
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000790- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
791 removed.
792
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000793- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
794 supported (see PEP 11).
795
796- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
797
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000798- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
799
800- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
801 (see PEP 11).
802
803- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
804 sizeof(char) must be 1.
805
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000806C API
807-----
808
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000809- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
810 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
811 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
812
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000813- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
814 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
815 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
816 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
817
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000818- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
819 generator objects.
820
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000821- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
822 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000823 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
824 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000825
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000826- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
827 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
828
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000829- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
830 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
831 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
832 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
833 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
834
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000835- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
836 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
837 about 10% faster.
838
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000839- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
840 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
841
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000842- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
843 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
844 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
845 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
846
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000847Windows
848-------
849
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000850- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
851 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
852 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
853 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
854
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000855- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
856 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
857 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
858
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000859
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000860What's New in Python 2.3 final?
861===============================
862
863*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
864
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000865IDLE
866----
867
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000868- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
869 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
870 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
871 context-menu actions.
872
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000873- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
874 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
875 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
876 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
877 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
878 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
879 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
880 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
881 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
882
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000883
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000884What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
885=============================================
886
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000887*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000888
889Core and builtins
890-----------------
891
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000892- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000893 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000894 comment at the end are still unsupported.
895
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000896Extension modules
897-----------------
898
899- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
900 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
901 than once. This has been fixed.
902
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000903- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
904 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
905 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
906 call.
907
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000908- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
909
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000910Library
911-------
912
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000913- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
914 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
915
916- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
917 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
918 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
919 restored.
920
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000921IDLE
922----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000923
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000924- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000925
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000926Build
927-----
928
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000929- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
930 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
931
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000932C API
933-----
934
935Windows
936-------
937
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000938- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
939 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
940
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000941- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
942
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000943Mac
944---
945
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000946- Various fixes to pimp.
947
948- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
949
950- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
951 more problems than it solves.
952
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000953
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000954What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
955=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000956
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000957*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
958
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000959Core and builtins
960-----------------
961
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000962- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
963 by sys.setcheckinterval().
964
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000965- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
966 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000967 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000968
969- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
970 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
971 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000972 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000973
974- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
975 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000976
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000977- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
978 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
979 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
980
981- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000982 770247.
983
984- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000985
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000986Extension modules
987-----------------
988
989- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
990 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
991
992- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
993
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000994- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
995
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000996- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
997 contained within the _strptime module.
998
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000999- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1000 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1001
1002- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001003 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1004
1005- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1006 the find_class attribute, if present.
1007
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001008- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001009
1010 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1011 (SF bug 763298).
1012
1013 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001014 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1015 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1016 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001017
1018 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1019
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001020Library
1021-------
1022
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001023- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1024
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001025- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1026 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1027 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1028 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1029 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1030 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1031 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1032 or Tester().
1033
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001034- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1035 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1036 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1037 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1038 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1039 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1040 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1041 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1042 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001043
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001044 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001045
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001046- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1047 weren't before was an oversight.
1048
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001049- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1050 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1051
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001052- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1053 when there are no lines.
1054
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001055- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1056 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1057
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001058- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1059 to child processes.
1060
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001061- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1062
1063- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1064
1065- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1066 xmlrpclib.
1067
1068- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1069 responses.
1070
1071- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1072 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1073
1074- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1075 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1076 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1077
1078- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1079 used as patterns.
1080
1081- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1082 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1083 than Tk 8.3.
1084
1085- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1086
1087- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001088
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001089Tools/Demos
1090-----------
1091
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001092- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1093
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001094- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1095
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001096- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001097
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001098Build
1099-----
1100
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001101- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1102
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001103- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1104
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001105- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1106 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001107
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001108- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1109 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1110 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001111
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001112C API
1113-----
1114
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001115- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1116 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1117
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001118Windows
1119-------
1120
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001121- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1122 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1123 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1124 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1125 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1126 Python exception ::
1127
1128 thread.error: can't start new thread
1129
1130 is raised now.
1131
1132- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1133 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1134 instead of from DLL teardown.
1135
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001136Mac
1137---
1138
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001139- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001140 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001141 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1142 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1143 the executable in the bundle.
1144
1145- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001146
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001147- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1148
1149- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1150 on Panther.
1151
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001152What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1153================================
1154
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001155*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001156
1157Core and builtins
1158-----------------
1159
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001160- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1161 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1162 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1163 with the -i option.
1164
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001165- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1166 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1167
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001168- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1169 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1170
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001171- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1172 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1173 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1174 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1175 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1176 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1177 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1178 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1179 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1180 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1181 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1182 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1183 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001184
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001185- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1186 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1187 embedded in a lambda expression.
1188
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001189- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1190 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1191 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1192 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1193 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1194
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001195- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1196 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1197 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1198
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001199- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1200 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1201
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001202- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1203 It's writable again.
1204
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001205- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1206 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1207 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001208 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001209
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001210- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1211 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1212 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1213
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001214Extension modules
1215-----------------
1216
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001217- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1218 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1219
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001220- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1221 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1222 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1223 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1224
1225- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1226 collection.
1227
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001228- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1229 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1230 unique within a single program run.
1231
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001232- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1233 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1234
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001235- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1236 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1237
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001238- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1239 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001240
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001241- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1242
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001243- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1244 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1245
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001246- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1247 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1248 for many BSD-derived systems.
1249
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001250
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001251Library
1252-------
1253
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001254- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1255 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1256 primary ones:
1257
1258 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1259 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1260 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1261
1262 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1263 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1264 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1265 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1266 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1267 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1268
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001269- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1270 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1271 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1272 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1273 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1274 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1275 argument.
1276
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001277- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1278 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1279 in the archive.
1280
1281- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1282 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1283
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001284- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1285 569574).
1286
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001287- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1288 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1289 no more.
1290
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001291- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1292 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1293 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1294 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1295 code coverage.
1296
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001297- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1298 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1299 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001300 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1301 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001302
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001303- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1304 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1305 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001306 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001307
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001308- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1309
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001310- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1311 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1312 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1313 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1314
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001315- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1316 handling.
1317
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001318- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1319 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1320
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001321- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1322 in socket.py.
1323
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001324- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1325
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001326- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1327 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1328 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1329 opener with proxy support.
1330
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001331- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1332
1333- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1334
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001335Tools/Demos
1336-----------
1337
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001338- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1339
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001340- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1341
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001342- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1343 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001344
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001345- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1346 files.
1347
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001348Build
1349-----
1350
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001351- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001352 different root directory.
1353
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001354C API
1355-----
1356
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001357- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1358 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1359 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1360 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1361 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1362 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1363 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1364 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1365 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1366 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1367
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001368- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1369 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1370 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1371 from Python.
1372
1373
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001374New platforms
1375-------------
1376
1377None this time.
1378
1379Tests
1380-----
1381
1382- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1383 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1384
1385Windows
1386-------
1387
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001388- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1389
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001390- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1391 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1392 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1393 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1394 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1395 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1396 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1397 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1398 that's what it's for.
1399
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001400Mac
1401---
1402
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001403- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1404 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1405 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1406 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001407- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1408 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1409- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001410
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001411SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1412------------------------------------
1413
1414430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1415598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1416622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1417661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1418683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1419697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1420713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1421724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1422727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1423729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1424730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1425731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1426732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1427733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1428735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1429740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1430744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1431745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1432747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1433749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1434751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1435753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1436755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1437757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1438760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1439
1440
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001441What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1442================================
1443
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001444*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001445
1446Core and builtins
1447-----------------
1448
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001449- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1450 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1451
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001452- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1453 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1454 and cannot be strings).
1455
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001456- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1457 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1458 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1459 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1460
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001461- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1462 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1463 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1464 Python itself.
1465
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001466- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1467 the referenced object, if it has one.
1468
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001469- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1470 the thread started at
1471 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1472
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001473- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1474 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1475 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1476 placed on a list index.
1477
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001478- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1479 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1480 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1481 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1482
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001483- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1484 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1485 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1486 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1487 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1488 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1489 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1490
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001491- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1492 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1493 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1494 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1495 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1496
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001497- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1498 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001499
1500- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1501 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1502 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1503 #693195.)
1504
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001505- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1506 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001507
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001508- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001509 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001510 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1511 interpreter executions, would fail.
1512
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001513- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001514 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001515 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001516
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001517Extension modules
1518-----------------
1519
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001520- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1521 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1522 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1523 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1524
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001525- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1526 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1527
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001528- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1529 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1530 and Greg Chapman.)
1531
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001532- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1533 recursively.
1534
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001535- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001536 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1537 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1538 leaks.
1539
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001540- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1541
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001542- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1543 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1544 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1545 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1546 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1547 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1548 #705836.
1549
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001550- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001551 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1552
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001553- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1554 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1555 See SF bug #692416.
1556
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001557- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1558 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1559
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001560- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1561 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1562 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001563
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001564- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001565 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1566 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1567
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001568- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1569 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1570 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1571 timeouts to work properly.
1572
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001573Library
1574-------
1575
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001576- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1577 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1578 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1579 future release.
1580
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001581- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1582 for querying platform dependent features.
1583
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001584- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001585
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001586- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1587 pickle protocol versions.
1588
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001589- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1590 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1591 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1592
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001593- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1594
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001595- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1596 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1597 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1598 modules.
1599
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001600- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1601 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1602 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1603
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001604- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1605 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1606
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001607- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1608 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1609 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1610
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001611- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001612 MS Office extensions.
1613
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001614- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1615 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1616
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001617- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1618 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1619
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001620- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1621 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1622 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1623 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1624 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1625 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1626
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001627- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1628 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1629 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001630
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001631- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1632 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1633 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1634
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001635- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1636
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001637- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1638 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1639 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1640
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001641Tools/Demos
1642-----------
1643
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001644- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1645 See the module docstring for details.
1646
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001647Build
1648-----
1649
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001650- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1651 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001652
1653C API
1654-----
1655
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001656- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1657
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001658- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1659 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1660 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1661
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001662- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1663 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001664
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001665 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1666 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1667 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001668
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001669- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001670 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1671
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001672- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1673 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1674 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001675
1676New platforms
1677-------------
1678
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001679None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001680
1681Tests
1682-----
1683
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001684- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1685 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001686
1687Windows
1688-------
1689
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001690- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1691 function.
1692
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001693- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1694 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001695
1696Mac
1697---
1698
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001699- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1700 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001701
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001702- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1703 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001704
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001705- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1706 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1707 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001708
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001709- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001710 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1711 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001712
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001713- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1714 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001715
1716
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001717What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1718=================================
1719
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001720*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001721
1722Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001723-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001724
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001725- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1726 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1727 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1728
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001729- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1730 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1731 (SF patch #664376.)
1732
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001733- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1734 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1735 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1736 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1737 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1738 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001739 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001740
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001741- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1742 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1743 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1744 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001745 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001746
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001747- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1748 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1749 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1750 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1751 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1752 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1753 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1754 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1755 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1756 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1757 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1758
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001759- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1760 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1761 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1762 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1763 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1764 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1765
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001766- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1767 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1768
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001769- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1770 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1771 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1772 case.)
1773
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001774- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1775 passed as unicode strings.
1776
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001777- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1778 See SF bug #683467.
1779
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001780- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1781 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1782
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001783- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1784
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001785- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1786
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001787- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1788 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1789 arguments.
1790
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001791- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1792 See SF bug #667147.
1793
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001794- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001795 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001796 See SF bug #676155.
1797
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001798- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001799 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001800 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1801 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1802 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1803 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1804 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1805 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001806
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001807Extension modules
1808-----------------
1809
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001810- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1811 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1812 tp_as_number pointer.
1813
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001814- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1815 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1816 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1817 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1818 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1819
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001820- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1821
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001822- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1823
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001824- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001825 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001826 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1827 patch #678531.)
1828
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001829- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1830 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1831
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001832- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1833 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1834
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001835- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1836
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001837- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1838 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1839 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1840
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001841- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1842
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001843- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1844 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1845
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001846- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001847
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001848- datetime changes:
1849
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001850 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1851
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001852 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1853 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1854 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1855 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1856 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1857 now.
1858
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001859 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001860 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1861 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001862
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001863 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001864 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001865 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1866 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1867 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1868 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001869
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001870 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1871 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1872 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001873 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1874
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001875 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1876 by a later example coded by Guido.
1877
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001878 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001879 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1880 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1881 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001882 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1883 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1884
1885 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1886 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1887 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1888 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1889 tzinfo subclass instance.
1890
1891 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1892 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1893 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1894 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1895 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1896 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1897 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1898 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001899
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001900 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1901 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1902 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1903 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1904 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001905 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1906
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001907 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001908
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001909 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1910 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1911 as a naive datetime object.
1912
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001913 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1914 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1915 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1916
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001917 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1918 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1919 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1920 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1921 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1922 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1923 comparison.
1924
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001925 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1926 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1927 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1928 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001929 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001930
1931 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001932
1933 and ::
1934
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001935 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1936
1937 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1938 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1939 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1940 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1941
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001942 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1943 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1944 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1945 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1946 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1947
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001948 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1949 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001950 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1951 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001952
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001953Library
1954-------
1955
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001956- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1957 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1958
1959- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1960 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1961 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1962 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1963 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1964 See PEP 307 for details.
1965
1966- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1967 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1968
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001969- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1970 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001971 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001972 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1973 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001974 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001975
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001976- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1977 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1978
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001979- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1980 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1981 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1982
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001983- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1984
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001985- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1986 exception.
1987
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001988- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1989 class.
1990
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001991- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1992 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1993 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1994
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001995- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1996 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1997
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001998- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001999 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2000 See SF bug #659228.
2001
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002002- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2003 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2004 See SF patch #651082.
2005
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002006- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002007
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002008- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2009 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2010
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002011- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002012 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002013
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002014- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2015 DOS paths from other platforms.
2016
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002017Tools/Demos
2018-----------
2019
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002020- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2021 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2022 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2023 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2024 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2025 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2026 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2027 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2028 example:
2029
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002030 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2031 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002032
2033 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2034
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002035
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002036Build
2037-----
2038
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002039- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2040 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2041 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002042 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2043
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002044 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2045
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002046- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2047 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2048 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2049 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2050 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2051 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2052 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2053 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2054 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2055
2056- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2057 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2058 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2059 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2060
2061- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2062 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2063
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002064C API
2065-----
2066
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002067- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2068 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002069
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002070- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2071 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2072 tp_as_number pointer.
2073
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002074- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2075 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2076 (SF #681367)
2077
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002078- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2079 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2080 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2081 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002082
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002083Tests
2084-----
2085
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002086- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002087 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2088 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2089 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2090 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2091 pydoc.)
2092
2093- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2094
2095- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002096
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002097Windows
2098-------
2099
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002100- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2101 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2102 time).
2103
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002104- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2105 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2106
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002107- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2108 release without strong cryptography.
2109
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002110- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002111 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002112
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002113- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2114 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2115
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002116Mac
2117---
2118
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002119- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2120 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002121
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002122- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2123 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2124 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002125
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002126- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2127 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002128
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002129- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2130 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2131 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2132 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002133
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002134- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002135 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2136 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2137 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002138
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002139
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002140What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002141=================================
2142
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002143*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002144
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002145Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002146--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002147
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002148- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2149
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002150- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2151 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002152 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002153 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002154 a different meaning than before.
2155
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002156- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002157 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002158 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002159
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002160- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002161 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002162 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002163
2164- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2165 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2166 and deallocation.
2167
2168- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2169 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2170
2171- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2172 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2173 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2174 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2175 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2176
2177- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2178 now detected by the garbage collector.
2179
2180- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2181 [SF bug 519621]
2182
2183- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2184 identifier.
2185
2186- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2187 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2188 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2189 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2190 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2191 [SF bug 563060]
2192
2193- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2194 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2195 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2196 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2197 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2198
2199- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2200 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2201 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2202
2203- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2204
2205- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2206 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2207 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2208 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2209 state of the slots would be lost.)
2210
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002211Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002212-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002213
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002214- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002215 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2216 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2217 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2218 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002219 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2220 Jython 2.1.
2221
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002222- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002223 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002224 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2225 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2226 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2227 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2228 these, see PEP 302.
2229
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002230- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2231 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2232 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2233
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002234- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2235 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2236 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2237
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002238- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2239 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2240 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2241
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002242- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2243 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2244 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2245 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2246 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2247 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2248 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2249 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2250 releases or implementations.
2251
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002252- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002253 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2254 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002255
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002256- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2257 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2258
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002259- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2260 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2261 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2262
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002263- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2264 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2265
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002266- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2267 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002268 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2269 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002270
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002271- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2272 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2273 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2274 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2275 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2276
2277 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2278 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2279 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2280 pattern.
2281
2282 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2283 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2284 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2285 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2286
2287 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2288 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2289 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2290 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2291 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2292 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2293
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002294- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2295 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2296 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2297 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2298 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2299 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2300 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2301 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002302
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002303- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2304 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2305 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2306 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2307 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002308 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2309 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2310 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2311 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2312 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2313 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2314 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002315
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002316- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2317 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2318
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002319- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2320 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2321 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2322 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2323 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2324 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2325 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2326 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2327 to Zack Weinberg!
2328
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002329- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2330 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2331 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2332 type. This has been fixed now.
2333
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002334- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2335 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2336 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2337
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002338- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2339 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2340 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2341 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2342 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2343 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2344 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2345 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002346 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002347
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002348- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2349 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2350 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002351
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002352- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2353 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2354 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2355 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2356 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2357 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2358 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2359 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002360 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002361 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2362 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2363
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002364- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2365 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2366 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2367 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2368 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2369 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2370 this.)
2371
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002372- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2373 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002374 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002375 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002376 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2377 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002378 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2379 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002380
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002381- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2382 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2383 currently running.
2384
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002385- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2386 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2387 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2388 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2389
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002390- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2391 as directory names.
2392
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002393- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2394 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2395
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002396- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2397 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2398
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002399- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002400 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2401 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002402
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002403- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2404 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2405 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2406 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2407 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2408
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002409- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2410 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2411 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2412 removed.
2413
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002414- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2415 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2416 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2417
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002418- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2419 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2420 to __debug__.
2421
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002422- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2423 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2424 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2425
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002426- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2427 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2428 deprecated now.
2429
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002430- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2431 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2432 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002433
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002434- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2435 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2436 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2437 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2438 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002439
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002440- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2441 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2442
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002443- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2444 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2445 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002446 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002447 is backward compatible.
2448
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002449- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2450 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2451 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2452 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2453 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2454
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002455- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2456 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2457 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2458 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2459 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2460 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002461
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002462- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2463 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2464
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002465- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2466 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2467
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002468- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2469 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2470 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2471 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2472 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2473
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002474- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2475 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2476 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2477
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002478- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002479 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2480
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002481- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2482 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2483 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002484
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002485- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2486 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2487
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002488- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2489 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2490 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2491
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002492- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2493
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002494Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002495-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002496
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002497- Added three operators to the operator module:
2498 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2499 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2500 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2501
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002502- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2503
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002504- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2505 archives.
2506
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002507- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2508 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2509 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2510
2511 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2512
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002513- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2514 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2515 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002516 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002517
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002518- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2519 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2520 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2521 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002522 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2523 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2524 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2525 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002526
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002527- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2528 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002529
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002530- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2531
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002532- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2533 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2534
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002535- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2536 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2537 supported.
2538
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002539- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2540
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002541- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2542 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002543
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002544- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2545 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2546
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002547- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2548
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002549- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2550 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2551
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002552- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2553 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2554 functions but callable type objects.
2555
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002556- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002557 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002558 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002559
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002560- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2561 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002562
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002563- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2564 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002565
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002566- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2567 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2568 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2569 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2570
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002571- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2572 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002573
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002574- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2575 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2576 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2577 and __imul__.
2578
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002579- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002580 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2581 is called.
2582
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002583- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2584 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2585 interpreter was compiled.
2586
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002587- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2588 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2589 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002590 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002591 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2592 1, not 2.
2593
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002594- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2595 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2596 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2597 limit.
2598
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002599- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2600 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2601 bug #623464.
2602
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002603- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2604 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2605 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2606 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2607
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002608Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002609-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002610
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002611- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2612
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002613- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2614 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2615 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2616 with Python 2.3a2.
2617
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002618- os.path exposes getctime.
2619
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002620- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002621 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002622 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002623 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002624 unit tests of floating point results.
2625
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002626- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2627 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2628 has been increased.
2629
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002630- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2631 executed.
2632
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002633- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2634 postinstallation script.
2635
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002636- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2637 test the current module.
2638
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002639- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002640 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2641 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2642 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2643 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2644
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002645- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002646 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002647 Ward's Optik package.
2648
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002649- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2650 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2651 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2652 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2653
2654- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2655 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002656 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002657
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002658- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2659 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2660 shelf are binary pickles.
2661
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002662- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2663 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2664
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002665- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2666 modules are iterators now.
2667
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002668- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2669 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2670 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2671 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2672 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2673 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002674
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002675- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2676 with their entity value.
2677
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002678- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2679
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002680- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2681 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002682
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002683- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2684 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002685 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002686
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002687- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2688 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2689 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2690 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2691 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2692 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2693 main():
2694
2695 import locale
2696 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2697
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002698- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2699 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2700
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002701- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2702 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2703 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2704 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2705 to the new standard.
2706
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002707- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2708 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2709 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2710 an extension to the database.
2711
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002712- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2713 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2714 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2715 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002716 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002717
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002718- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002719 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002720
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002721- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2722 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2723 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2724 bounded integers.
2725
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002726- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2727 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2728 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2729 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2730 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2731 in existence.
2732
2733 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2734 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2735 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2736 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2737 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2738 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2739
2740 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2741 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2742 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2743 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2744
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002745- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2746 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2747 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2748
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002749- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2750
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002751- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2752 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2753 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2754 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2755
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002756- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2757 argument.
2758
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002759- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2760 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2761 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2762 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2763 [SF patch 560794].
2764
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002765- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2766 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2767 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002768 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2769 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2770 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002771
2772- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2773 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002774
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002775- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2776 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2777 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2778 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002779
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002780- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2781 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2782 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2783 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2784 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2785
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002786- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002787
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002788- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2789
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002790- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2791 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2792 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2793 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2794 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2795 identical to None.
2796
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002797- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2798 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2799 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2800 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2801 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2802 results now.
2803
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002804- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2805 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2806
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002807- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2808 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2809 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2810 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2811 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2812 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2813 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2814 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2815
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002816- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2817
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002818- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2819 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2820
2821- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2822 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2823 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2824 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2825 and other systems.
2826
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002827- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2828 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2829 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2830 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 +00002831 work well with these.
2832
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002833- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2834
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002835- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002836 connections.
2837
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002838- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2839 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2840 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2841
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002842- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2843 sets
2844
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002845- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2846 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2847 name.
2848
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002849- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2850 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2851 passed in.
2852
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002853- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002854 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002855 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2856 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002857
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002858- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2859
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002860- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2861
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002862- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2863 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2864 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2865
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002866- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2867 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2868 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2869 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002870 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002871
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002872- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002873 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002874 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002875
2876- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2877 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2878 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2879
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002880- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002881 the value of its expression argument.
2882
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002883- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2884 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2885 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2886
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002887- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2888 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2889 skipstone browser was included.
2890
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002891- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2892 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2893
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002894Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002895-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002896
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002897- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2898 names in addition to accepting file names.
2899
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002900- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2901 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2902 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2903 still used and useful.)
2904
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002905- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2906 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2907 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2908 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002909
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002910- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2911 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2912 the generated binary.
2913
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002914Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002915-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002916
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002917- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2918
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002919- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2920 except in the hands of experts.
2921
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002922- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002923 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2924 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2925 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002926
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002927- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2928 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2929 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2930 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2931 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2932 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2933 builds.
2934
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002935- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2936 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2937 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2938 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2939 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2940 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2941 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2942 new type.
2943
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002944- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002945
2946 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2947 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2948 positive infinities.
2949
2950 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2951 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2952 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2953 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2954 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2955 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2956 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2957
2958 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2959
2960 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2961
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002962- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2963 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2964 size of the executable.
2965
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002966- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2967 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2968 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2969 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002970
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002971- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2972
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002973- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2974 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2975 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002976
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002977- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2978 well as Unix.
2979
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002980- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2981 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2982 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2983 modules in the README file for details.
2984
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002985C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002986-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002987
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002988- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2989 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002990 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002991 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002992 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002993
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002994- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2995 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2996 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2997 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2998 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2999 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003000 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003001 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3002 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3003 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3004 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3005 aligned.)
3006
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003007- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3008 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3009 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3010
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003011- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3012 level.
3013
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003014- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3015 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3016 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3017 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3018 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3019
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003020- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3021 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3022 code.
3023
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003024- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3025 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3026 adjusting for negative indices.
3027
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003028- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3029 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3030 object.
3031
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003032- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3033 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3034 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3035
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003036- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3037 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003038
3039- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3040
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003041- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3042 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3043 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3044 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3045
3046- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3047
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003048- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003049
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003050- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003051 without going through the buffer API.
3052
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003053- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003054
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003055- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3056 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3057 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3058 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3059
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003060- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3061 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3062
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003063- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003064 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3065
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003066New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003067-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003068
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003069- OpenVMS is now supported.
3070
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003071- AtheOS is now supported.
3072
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003073- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3074
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003075- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3076
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003077Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003078-----
3079
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003080- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3081 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3082 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003083
3084Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003085-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003086
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003087- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3088 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3089 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3090 bugs.
3091 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003092 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003093 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3094 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003095 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003096
3097- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003098 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003099
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003100- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3101 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3102
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003103- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3104 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003105 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003106 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3107
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003108- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3109 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3110 use files" uninstall option).
3111
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003112- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3113
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003114- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3115 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3116
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003117- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3118 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3119 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3120
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003121- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3122 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3123 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3124 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3125 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003126 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3127 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3128 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003129
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003130- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003131 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003132 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3133 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3134 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3135 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3136 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3137 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3138 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3139 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3140 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3141 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3142 work around.
3143
3144- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3145 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3146 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3147 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3148 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3149 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3150 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3151 specified with O_CREAT too).
3152
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003153Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003154----
3155
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003156- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003157
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003158- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3159 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3160 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3161
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003162- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3163 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3164 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3165
3166- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3167 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3168 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3169 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3170 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3171 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3172 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3173 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003174
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003175- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3176 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3177 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003178
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003179- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3180 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3181 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3182 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3183 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003184
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003185- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3186 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3187 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003188
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003189- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3190 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003191
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003192- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3193 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3194 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3195 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3196 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003197
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003198- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3199 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3200 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3201
3202- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3203 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3204 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003205
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003206- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3207 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3208 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3209 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003210 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003211
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003212- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3213 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003214
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003215- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3216 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003217
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003218- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003219 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003220 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3221 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003222
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003223
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003224What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003225===============================
3226
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003227*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3228
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003229Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003230--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003231
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003232- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3233 with a custom metaclass.
3234
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003235Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003236-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003237
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003238- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3239 are proxies.
3240
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003241Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003242-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003243
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003244- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3245 very short strings.
3246
3247- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3248 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3249 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3250 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3251 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3252
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003253Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003254-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003255
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003256- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3257 close or delete time).
3258
3259- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3260 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3261
3262- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3263
3264- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003265 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003266
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003267Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003268-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003269
3270Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003271-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003272
3273C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003274-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003275
3276New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003277-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003278
3279Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003280-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003281
3282Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003283-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003284
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003285- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3286
3287- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3288 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3289
3290- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3291 deleted at process exit time.
3292
3293- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3294 in backslash.
3295
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003296Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003297----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003298
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003299- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3300 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3301 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3302
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003303
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003304What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003305===========================
3306
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003307*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3308
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003309Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003310--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003311
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003312- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3313 been extensively updated. See
3314
3315 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3316
3317 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3318
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003319- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3320 deleted!
3321
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003322- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3323 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3324 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3325 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3326 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3327
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003328- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3329
3330 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3331 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3332
3333 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3334 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3335 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3336 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3337 supported anyway.
3338
3339 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3340 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3341
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003342- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3343 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3344 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3345 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3346 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003347
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003348- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3349 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3350 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3351
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003352Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003353-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003354
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003355- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3356 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3357 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3358 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3359 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3360 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003361 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3362 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3363 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3364 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003365
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003366- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3367 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3368 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3369
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003370Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003371-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003372
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003373- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3374
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003375Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003376-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003377
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003378- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3379 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3380 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3381 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3382 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3383 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3384
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003385- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3386
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003387- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3388
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003389- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3390
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003391- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3392 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3393 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3394
3395- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3396
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003397Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003398-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003399
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003400- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3401 off a search on Google.
3402
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003403Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003404-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003405
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003406- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3407 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3408 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3409 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3410 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3411 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3412 other platforms should do likewise.
3413
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003414- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3415 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3416 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3417
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003418C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003419-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003420
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003421- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3422 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3423 producing key-value pairs.
3424
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003425- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003426 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003427 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3428 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3429 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3430 previously went unchallenged.
3431
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003432New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003433-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003434
3435Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003436-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003437
3438Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003439-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003440
3441Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003442----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003443
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003444- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3445 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003446
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003447- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3448 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3449 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3450 home.
3451
3452
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003453What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003454===========================
3455
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003456*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3457
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003458Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003459--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003460
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003461- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3462 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003463
3464 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003465 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003466
3467 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3468 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003469 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003470 This needs to be documented.
3471
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003472- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3473 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3474
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003475- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3476 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3477 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3478
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003479- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3480 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3481
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003482- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3483 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3484 class forbids it).
3485
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003486- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3487 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3488 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3489
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003490- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3491
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003492Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003493-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003494
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003495- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3496 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003497 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003498
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003499- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3500 (like 1 + '').
3501
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003502Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003503-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003504
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003505- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3506 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3507 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3508 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003509 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003510 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3511
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003512- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3513 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3514 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3515 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3516
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003517- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3518 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003519 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3520 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3521 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003522
3523- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3524 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003525
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003526- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3527 bytes on its input.
3528
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003529Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003530-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003531
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003532- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003533 convenience function.
3534
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003535- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3536 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3537 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003538 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3539 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3540 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3541 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3542 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3543 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003544
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003545- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3546 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3547 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3548 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3549
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003550- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3551 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3552 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3553
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003554- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3555 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3556 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3557 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3558
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003559- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3560 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003561 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003562 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3563 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3564 new -l and -e options.
3565
3566- statcache is now deprecated.
3567
3568- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3569 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003570 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003571 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3572 time properly taken into account.
3573
3574- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3575 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3576 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3577 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3578
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003579Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003580-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003581
3582Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003583-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003584
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003585- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3586 is built with libdb3 if available.
3587
3588- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3589
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003590C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003591-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003592
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003593- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3594 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3595 PySequence_Size().
3596
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003597- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3598
3599- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3600 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3601 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3602
3603- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3604 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3605
3606- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3607 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3608
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003609New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003610-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003611
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003612- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3613 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3614
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003615- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3616 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3617
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003618- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3619
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003620Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003621-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003622
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003623- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3624 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3625
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003626Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003627-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003628
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003629Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003630----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003631
3632- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3633 removed completely in the next release.
3634
3635- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3636 OSX.
3637
3638- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3639 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3640
3641- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3642
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003643
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003644What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003645===========================
3646
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003647*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3648
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003649Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003650--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003651
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003652- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003653 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003654 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003655 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3656 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003657 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3658 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003659 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3660 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003661
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003662- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3663 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3664
3665- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3666 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3667
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003668Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003669-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003670
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003671- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3672 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3673 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3674 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3675 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3676 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3677 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3678 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3679
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003680- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3681 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3682 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3683 example).
3684
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003685- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003686 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003687 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003688 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003689
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003690- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3691 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3692 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003693 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003694
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003695- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3696 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3697 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3698 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3699 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3700 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3701
3702 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3703
3704 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3705
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003706Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003707-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003708
3709- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3710
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003711- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3712
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003713- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3714 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003715
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003716- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3717 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3718 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3719 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3720 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3721 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003722 attributes.
3723
3724- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3725 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3726 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003727
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003728- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3729 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3730 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003731
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003732- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3733 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3734 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003735 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3736 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3737
3738- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3739 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003740
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003741Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003742-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003743
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003744- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3745 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3746
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003747- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3748 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3749 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3750 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3751
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003752- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3753 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3754 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3755 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3756
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003757 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3758 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3759 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3760 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3761 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3762 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3763 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3764 without losing information).
3765
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003766- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003767 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3768 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3769 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3770 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3771 module).
3772
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003773 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003774 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3775 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3776 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3777 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003778
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003779- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003780 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3781 encoding.
3782
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003783- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3784 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3785
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003786- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003787 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3788
3789- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3790 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3791 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3792 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3793
3794- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3795
3796- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3797 ON, and OFF.
3798
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003799- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3800 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3801
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003802Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003803-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003804
3805- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3806 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3807 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003808
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003809- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3810 been added: -X and -E.
3811
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003812Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003813-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003814
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003815- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3816 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3817
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003818C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003819-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003820
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003821- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3822 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3823 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3824 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3825 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3826
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003827- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3828 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3829 as long) arguments.
3830
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003831- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3832 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3833 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3834 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3835 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3836 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3837
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003838- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3839 input.
3840
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003841New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003842-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003843
3844Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003845-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003846
3847Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003848-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003849
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003850- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3851 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3852 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3853
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003854- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3855 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3856 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003857 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003858
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003859 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3860 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3861 import signal
3862 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003863
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003864 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003865 while 1:
3866 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003867 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003868 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3869 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3870 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3871 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003872
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003873
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003874What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3875===========================
3876
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003877*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3878
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003879Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003880--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003881
3882- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3883 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3884 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3885
3886- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3887 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3888 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3889 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3890 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3891 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3892 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003893
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003894- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003895 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003896 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3897 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3898 associate a docstring with a property.
3899
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003900- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3901 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3902 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3903 other built-in object types.
3904
3905- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3906 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3907 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3908 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3909 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3910
3911- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3912 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3913
3914- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3915 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003916 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003917 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3918 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3919 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3920 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3921 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3922
3923- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3924 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3925 class.
3926
3927- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3928 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3929 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3930 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3931
3932- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3933 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3934 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3935 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3936
3937- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3938 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3939
3940- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3941 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3942 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3943 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3944 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003945 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003946 with the same value as s.
3947
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003948- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3949
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003950Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003951----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003952
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003953- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3954
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003955- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3956 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3957 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3958 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3959 objects.
3960
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003961- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3962 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003963 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3964 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3965
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003966- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3967 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3968 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3969
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003970Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003971-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003972
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003973- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3974 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3975 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3976 by the instances.
3977
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003978- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3979 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3980 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3981
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003982- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3983 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3984 before the entire comparison is complete.
3985
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003986- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3987 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3988 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3989
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003990- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3991 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3992 getwriter().
3993
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003994- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3995 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3996
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003997- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003998 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3999 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4000
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004001- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4002 iterable object.
4003
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004004- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4005 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004006
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004007- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4008 authentication.
4009
4010- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4011 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004012
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004013- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004014 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4015 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4016 a sample driver.)
4017
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004018Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004019-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004020
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004021- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4022 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4023 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4024 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4025 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4026 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4027 kernel has large file support.
4028
4029- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4030 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4031 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4032 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4033 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4034
4035- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4036 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4037 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4038
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004039C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004040-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004041
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004042- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4043 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4044
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004045New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004046-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004047
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004048- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4049 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4050
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004051Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004052-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004053
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004054- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4055 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4056 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4057 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4058 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4059
4060- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4061 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4062 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4063 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4064
4065- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4066 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4067
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004068Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004069-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004070
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004071- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004072 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4073 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004074
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004075
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004076What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4077===========================
4078
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004079*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4080
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004081Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004082----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004083
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004084- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4085 big to represent as a C double.
4086
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004087- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4088 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4089 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4090 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4091 restriction).
4092
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004093- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4094 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4095 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4096 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4097 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4098
4099 >>> dir([])
4100 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4101 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4102 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4103 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4104 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4105 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4106 'reverse', 'sort']
4107
4108 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4109
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004110- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004111 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4112 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4113 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4114 OverflowError exception.
4115
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004116- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004117 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004118 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4119 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4120 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4121 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4122 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004123 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004124 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4125 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4126
4127 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4128 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4129 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4130 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004131
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004132- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004133 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4134 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4135 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4136 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4137 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4138 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4139 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4140 once it is created.
4141
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004142- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4143 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4144 (key, value) pairs.
4145
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004146- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004147 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4148 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4149
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004150- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4151 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4152 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4153 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4154 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004155
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004156- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004157 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4158 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4159
4160 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4161
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004162- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004163 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4164
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004165Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004166-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004167
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004168- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004169 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4170 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004171
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004172- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4173 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4174 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4175 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4176 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4177 in this area anymore).
4178
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004179- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4180 threading.Timer.
4181
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004182- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4183 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4184
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004185- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004186 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4187
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004188- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004189 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4190 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4191 converted to Python longs.
4192
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004193- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004194 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4195
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004196- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4197 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4198 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4199
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004200Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004201-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004202
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004203- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4204 division operators as per PEP 238.
4205
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004206Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004207-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004208
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004209- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4210 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4211 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4212 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4213
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004214C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004215-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004216
4217- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004218
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004219- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4220 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004221 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004222
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004223 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4224 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004225 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004226 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004227
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004228- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004229 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4230 module:
4231
4232 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004233
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004234 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4235 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004236
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004237 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4238 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004239
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004240 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4241
4242 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4243
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004244- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004245 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4246 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4247 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004248
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004249New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004250-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004251
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004252- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4253 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4254 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4255 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4256 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004257
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004258Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004259-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004260
4261Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004262-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004263
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004264- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4265 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4266 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4267 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004268 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4269 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4270 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4271 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4272 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004273
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004274- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004275 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4276
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004277
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004278What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4279===========================
4280
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004281*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4282
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004283Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004284-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004285
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004286- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4287 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4288
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004289- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4290 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4291 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004292
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004293- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4294 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4295 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4296 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004297
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004298- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4299
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004300- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004301
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004302Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004303-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004304
4305- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004306 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004307 the module docstring for details.
4308
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004309Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004310-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004311
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004312- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004313 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4314 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4315 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004316
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004317- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4318 Nick Mathewson.
4319
4320Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004321----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004322
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004323- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4324 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4325 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4326 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4327 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4328 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4329 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4330 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4331
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004332- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4333 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4334 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4335 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4336
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004337- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4338 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4339 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4340 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4341 come a long way).
4342
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004343- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4344 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4345 write filters for these warnings).
4346
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004347- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4348 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4349 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4350 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4351 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4352
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004353- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4354 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4355 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4356 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4357 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4358 older distribution.
4359
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004360Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004361-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004362
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004363- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4364 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004365 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004366
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004367- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4368 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4369 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4370
4371- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4372
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004373- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4374
4375- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4376
4377- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4378
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004379- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004380
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004381- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4382
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004383New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004384-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004385
4386C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004387-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004388
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004389- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4390 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4391 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4392 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4393 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4394 against buffer overruns.
4395
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004396- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004397 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4398 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004399 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4400 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4401 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4402
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004403- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4404 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4405 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4406 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4407 deprecated.
4408
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004409Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004410-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004411
4412- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4413 relevant is found.
4414
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004415
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004416What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004417===========================
4418
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004419*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4420
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004421Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004422----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004423
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004424- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4425 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4426 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4427 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4428 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4429 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4430 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4431 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004432 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004433 repaired.
4434
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004435- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004436 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004437 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4438 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4439 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4440 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4441 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4442 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4443 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4444 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4445
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004446- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4447 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4448 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4449 leading BMO character).
4450
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004451- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4452 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4453 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4454
4455 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4456 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4457 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004458
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004459 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4460 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4461 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4462 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4463 for various simple to use conversions.
4464
4465 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4466 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4467
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004468 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4469 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4470 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4471 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4472 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4473 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4474 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4475 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4476 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4477 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4478 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4479 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4480 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4481 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4482 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004483
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004484- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4485 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4486 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004487 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004488 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004489
4490 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004491 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4492 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4493 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4494 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4495 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004496 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4497 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004498
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004499 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4500 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4501 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004502 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004503
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004504- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4505 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4506 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4507 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4508 floating arithmetic,
4509
4510 x = 9007199254740992.0
4511 print long(x)
4512
4513 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4514 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4515 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4516 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4517 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4518 functions are of good quality).
4519
4520 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4521 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4522 algorithms to break.
4523
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004524- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4525 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4526 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4527 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4528 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4529 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4530 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4531 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4532 order.
4533
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004534- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4535 operation along the most common code paths.
4536
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004537- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4538 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4539
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004540- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4541 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4542 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4543 {}.update(UserDict())
4544
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004545- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4546 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4547 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4548 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4549 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4550 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4551 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4552 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4553
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004554- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004555 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004556
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004557 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004558 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4559 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004560 join() method of strings
4561 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004562 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4563 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004564 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004565 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004566
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004567- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4568 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4569
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004570- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4571 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4572
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004573- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4574 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4575 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4576 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4577
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004578- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4579 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004580 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004581 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4582 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004583
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004584- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4585
4586
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004587Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004588-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004589
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004590- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004591 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004592 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4593 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4594
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004595- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4596 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4597
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004598- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4599 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4600 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4601 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4602
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004603- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4604 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4605 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4606
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004607- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4608
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004609- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4610
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004611- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4612 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4613 that are still imported into string.py).
4614
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004615- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4616
4617- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4618 Now it does.
4619
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004620- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4621
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004622- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4623 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4624 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4625 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4626 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004627 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4628 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004629
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004630- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4631 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4632 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4633 'help(object)'.
4634
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004635Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004636-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004637
4638- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004639 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004640 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4641 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4642
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004643- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004644 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4645 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004646
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004647C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004648-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004649
4650- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4651 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004652
4653----
4654
4655**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**