blob: 1598c64849377ec427f7846afb68f3e97ae5f71e [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000015- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
16 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
17 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
18
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000019- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
20
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000021- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
22 reference counts in some error exit cases.
23
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000024- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
25 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
26 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
27 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
28 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
29 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
30 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
31 realloc.
32
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000033- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
34 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
35
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000036- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
37 like their int counterparts.
38
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000039- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
40 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
41 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
42 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
43 for a longer write-up of the problem).
44
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000045- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
46 serializing floats.
47
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000048- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
49 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
50 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
51
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000052- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
53 278.
54
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000055- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
56 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
57 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
58 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
59 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
60 PyNumber_*().
61 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
62
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000063- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
64 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
65 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
66 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
67
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000068- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
69 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
70 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
71 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
72 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
73
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000074- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
75 disabled caused a crash.
76
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000077- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
78 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
79
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000080- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000081 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
82
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000083- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
84
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000085- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000086 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
87 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
88 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000089
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000090- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
91
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000092- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
93 returning None.
94
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000095- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000096 ('\') with a specific error message.
97
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000098- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
99
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000100- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
101 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
102
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000103- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000104 an ferror() call.
105
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000106- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
107 list.sort().
108
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000109- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
110 (2+3) --> (5).
111
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000112- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
113
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000114- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
115 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000116
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000117- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
118 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
119 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
120
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000121Extension Modules
122-----------------
123
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000124- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
125 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
126 for large or negative values.
127
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000128- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000129 implemented treated all integer values except 1 as false.
130
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000131- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
132
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000133- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
134 if available on the platform.
135
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000136- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
137 available on the platform.
138
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000139- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
140 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
141
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000142- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
143
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000144- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
145 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
146 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
147
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000148- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
149
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000150- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
151 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
152
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000153- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000154 file size.
155
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000156- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
157
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000158- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
159 {remove_history,replace_history}
160
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000161- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
162 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000163
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000164- stat_float_times is now True.
165
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000166- array.array objects are now picklable.
167
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000168- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
169 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
170
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000171- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
172 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
173 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
174
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000175- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
176 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000177
178Library
179-------
180
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000181- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
182 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
183 Tkdnd.
184
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000185- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
186 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
187
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000188- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
189 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
190
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000191- textwrap now processes text chucks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
192 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
193
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000194- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
195 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
196
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000197- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
198 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
199
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000200- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
201 though this can be missing in embedded interpreters
202
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000203- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
204
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000205- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
206 error messages.
207
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000208- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
209
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000210- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
211 Bug #1224621.
212
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000213- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
214 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
215 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
216 terminates by raising StopIteration.
217
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000218- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
219
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000220- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
221 component of the path.
222
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000223- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
224 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
225 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
226 class at all.
227
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000228- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
229 files to PyPI.
230
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000231- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
232 them to PyPI.
233
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000234- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
235 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
236 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
237 work as expected.
238
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000239- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
240 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
241
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000242- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000243 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
244
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000245- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
246
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000247- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
248 to build.
249
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000250- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
251 symbolic links on Windows.
252
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000253- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000254 profile.py if available.
255
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000256- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
257
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000258- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
259 in LWPCookieJar.
260
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000261- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
262
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000263- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
264
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000265- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
266
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000267- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
268
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000269- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
270
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000271- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
272
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000273- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
274
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000275- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
276
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000277- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
278 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
279 be exploited in various ways.
280
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000281- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
282
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000283- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
284
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000285- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
286
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000287- Enhancements to the csv module:
288
289 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000290 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000291 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000292 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
293 reporting.
294 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
295 dictates.
296 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000297 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000298 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000299 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
300 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000301 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
302 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000303 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000304 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
305 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
306 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
307 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
308 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
309 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
310 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
311 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
312 without first creating a dialect class.
313 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
314 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
315 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000316 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000317 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
318 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000319 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
320 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
321 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
322 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000323 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
324 This has been fixed.
325
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000326- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
327 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
328 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
329 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
330
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000331- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
332
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000333- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
334 (Bug #951915).
335
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000336- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
337 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
338 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
339 encoding alias table
340
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000341- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
342
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000343- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
344 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
345
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000346- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
347
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000348- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
349
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000350- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
351
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000352- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
353
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000354- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
355
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000356- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
357 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
358 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
359
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000360- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000361 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000362
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000363- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
364 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
365 tokenizer with very long source lines.
366
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000367- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
368 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
369
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000370- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
371 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000372
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000373- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
374 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
375
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000376- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
377 correctly.
378
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000379- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
380 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
381 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
382 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
383 between two lines.
384
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000385
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000386Build
387-----
388
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000389- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
390 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
391
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000392- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
393 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
394 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000395 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000396
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000397- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
398 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
399 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
400
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000401- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
402
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000403- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
404 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
405
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000406- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
407 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
408 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
409 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
410 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
411 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
412 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
413 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
414
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000415- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
416 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
417 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
418 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
419
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000420
421C API
422-----
423
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000424- Removed PyRange_New().
425
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000426
427Tests
428-----
429
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000430- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000431
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000432
433Documentation
434-------------
435
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000436- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
437
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000438- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
439
440- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
441
442- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
443
444- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
445
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000446- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
447 Closes bug #1166582.
448
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000449- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
450 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
451 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
452
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000453Mac
454---
455
456
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000457New platforms
458-------------
459
460- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
461
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000462
463Tools/Demos
464-----------
465
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000466- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
467
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000468- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000469
470
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000471What's New in Python 2.4 final?
472===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000473
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000474*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000475
476Core and builtins
477-----------------
478
479- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
480 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
481 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
482
483
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000484What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
485==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000486
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000487*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000488
489Core and builtins
490-----------------
491
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000492- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
493 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
494 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
495
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000496
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000497Library
498-------
499
500- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
501 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
502 raised is re-raised.
503
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000504- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
505 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
506
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000507- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
508 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
509 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
510 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
511 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
512 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
513 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
514 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
515 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
516 by the slice are recomputed now.
517
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000518- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000519
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000520Build
521-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000522
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000523- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
524 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
525 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000526
527C API
528-----
529
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000530- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
531
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000532
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000533What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
534================================
535
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000536*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000537
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000538License
539-------
540
541The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
542is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
543changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
544Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
545intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
546durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
547the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
548License::
549
550 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
551
552says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
553to Python 2.1.1.
554
555The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
556License Version 2.
557
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000558Core and builtins
559-----------------
560
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000561- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
562 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
563 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
564 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
565 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
566 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
567 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
568 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
569 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
570 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
571
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000572- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000573
574Extension Modules
575-----------------
576
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000577- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
578 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
579 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
580 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000581
582Library
583-------
584
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000585- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
586 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
587 returned.
588
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000589- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
590
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000591- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
592 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
593
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000594- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
595
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000596- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
597 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000598
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000599- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
600
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000601- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
602
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000603- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000604 the source code is updated and reloaded.
605
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000606Build
607-----
608
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000609- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000610
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000611What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
612================================
613
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000614*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000615
616Core and builtins
617-----------------
618
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000619- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000620 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
621
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000622- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
623 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
624 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
625 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
626
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000627- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
628 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
629
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000630- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
631 constant.
632
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000633- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
634 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
635 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
636 large), and to anomalies such as
637 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
638 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
639 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
640 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000641
642Extension modules
643-----------------
644
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000645- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
646 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000647 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
648 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
649 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000650
651Library
652-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000653
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000654- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000655 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000656 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
657 --swig-cpp.
658
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000659- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
660 it is set.
661
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000662- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000663
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000664- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
665 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
666 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
667 Closes bug #1039270.
668
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000669- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000670
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000671 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000672 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
673 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
674 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
675 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
676 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
677 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
678 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
679 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
680 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
681 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
682 + Updates to documentation.
683
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000684- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
685 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
686 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
687 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
688
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000689- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000690
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000691- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
692 applications should use the getmember function.
693
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000694- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
695
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000696- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
697 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
698 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
699 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
700 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
701 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
702 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
703 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
704 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
705
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000706- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
707 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000708 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000709
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000710- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
711 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
712 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
713 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
714 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
715 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
716 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
717 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000718
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000719- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
720 the new public features (of which there are many).
721
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000722- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000723 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
724 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
725 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
726 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000727 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000728
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000729- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
730
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000731- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
732 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
733 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
734 options.
735
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000736- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
737 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
738 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
739 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
740 conditions under which non-string values work.
741
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000742Build
743-----
744
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000745- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
746 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
747 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
748
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000749- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
750 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
751 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
752 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
753 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000754
755C API
756-----
757
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000758- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
759 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
760
761- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
762
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000763- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
764 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
765 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
766 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
767 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
768 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
769 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
770 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
771 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
772
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000773- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
774
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000775- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
776 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
777 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000778
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000779Tests
780-----
781
782- test__locale ported to unittest
783
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000784Mac
785---
786
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000787- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
788 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
789 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000790
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000791Tools/Demos
792-----------
793
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000794- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
795 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
796 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
797 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
798 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000799
800
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000801What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
802=================================
803
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000804*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000805
806Core and builtins
807-----------------
808
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000809- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000810 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
811
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000812- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
813 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
814 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
815 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
816 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
817 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
818 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
819 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000820 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
821 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
822 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
823 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
824 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000825
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000826- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
827 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
828 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
829 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
830 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
831
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000832- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
833
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000834- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
835 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
836
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000837- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
838 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
839 modified the list.
840
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000841- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
842 functions is now writable.
843
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000844- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
845 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
846 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
847 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
848
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000849- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
850 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
851 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
852 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
853 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000854
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000855- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
856 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
857
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000858Extension modules
859-----------------
860
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000861- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
862
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000863- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
864 data.
865
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000866- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
867 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
868 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
869 supposed to have been truncated away.
870
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000871- Added socket.socketpair().
872
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000873- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
874 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
875
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000876- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000877 versions of Python, have now been removed.
878
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000879Library
880-------
881
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000882- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000883 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000884
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000885- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
886 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
887
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000888- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
889 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
890
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000891- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
892
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000893- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
894 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000895
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000896- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
897 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
898
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000899- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
900
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000901- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
902
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000903- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
904
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000905- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
906 Percivall.
907
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000908- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
909 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
910
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000911- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
912 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
913 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000914 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000915
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000916- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
917 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
918 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
919 and exponent.
920
921- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
922
923- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +0000924 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000925 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
926
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000927- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
928 to the readline module.
929
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000930- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000931 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
932 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000933
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000934- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
935 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
936 contains symlinks.
937
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000938- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
939 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
940
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000941- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
942 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
943 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
944
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000945- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
946 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
947 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
948 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
949 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
950 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
951 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
952 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
953 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
954 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
955 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
956 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
957 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
958
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000959- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
960
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000961Tools/Demos
962-----------
963
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000964- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
965 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
966
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000967- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
968
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000969Build
970-----
971
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000972- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
973 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
974 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
975 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
976 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
977 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
978 plans to do so.
979
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000980- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
981 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
982
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000983- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
984 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
985
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000986- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
987 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
988
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000989- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
990 GNU/k*BSD systems.
991
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000992- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
993 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
994
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000995C API
996-----
997
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000998..
999
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001000Documentation
1001-------------
1002
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001003- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1004 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1005
1006- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1007 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1008 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001009
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001010New platforms
1011-------------
1012
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001013- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1014
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001015Tests
1016-----
1017
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001018..
1019
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001020Windows
1021-------
1022
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001023- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1024 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1025 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1026 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1027 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1028 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1029 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1030 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1031 the problem.
1032
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001033Mac
1034---
1035
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001036..
1037
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001038
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001039What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1040=================================
1041
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001042*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001043
1044Core and builtins
1045-----------------
1046
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001047- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1048 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1049 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1050 sensitive code.
1051
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001052- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001053 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001054
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001055 @staticmethod
1056 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001057
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001058 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001059
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001060- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1061 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1062 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1063 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1064 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1065 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1066 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1067 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1068 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1069 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1070 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1071
1072 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1073 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1074 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1075 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1076 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1077 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1078 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1079
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001080- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1081 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1082
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001083- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001084 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001085
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001086- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001087 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001088 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1089
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001090- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001091 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1092 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1093
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001094- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1095 types that support garbage collection.
1096
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001097- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1098
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001099- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1100 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1101 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1102 Jython.
1103
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001104- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1105
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001106- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1107 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1108
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001109- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1110 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1111 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001112
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001113- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1114 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1115 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1116
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001117Extension modules
1118-----------------
1119
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001120- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1121
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001122Library
1123-------
1124
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001125- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1126 TIS-620
1127
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001128- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1129 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1130 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1131 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1132 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1133 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1134 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1135 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1136 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1137 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1138
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001139- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1140
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001141- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1142 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1143 same as when the argument is omitted).
1144 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1145
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001146- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1147
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001148- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1149 schemes are offered.
1150
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001151- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1152
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001153- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1154 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1155 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1156
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001157- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1158
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001159- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1160 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1161
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001162- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1163 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1164 when dummy_threading is being used.
1165
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001166- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1167 from a tarfile.
1168
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001169- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001170 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001171
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001172- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1173 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1174 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1175 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1176
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001177- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1178 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1179
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001180- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1181 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1182 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1183 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1184 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1185 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1186 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1187 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1188 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1189 by some other method in progress).
1190
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001191- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1192 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1193 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001194
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001195- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1196
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001197- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1198 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1199 AM Kuchling.
1200
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001201- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1202 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1203 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1204
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001205- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1206 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1207 instead of unsigned.
1208
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001209- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001210 no longer part of the public API.
1211
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001212- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1213 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1214 string methods of the same name).
1215
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001216- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001217 SF patch 945642.
1218
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001219- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1220
1221 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1222
1223 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1224 DocTestSuites.
1225
1226- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1227 that provide thread-local data.
1228
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001229- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1230 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1231
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001232- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1233
1234- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1235 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1236 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1237
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001238- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1239
1240 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1241 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1242 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001243
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001244 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1245 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1246 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1247 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1248
1249 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1250 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1251
1252 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1253 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1254 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1255 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1256
1257 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1258 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1259 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1260 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1261 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1262
1263 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1264 wrapping help output.
1265
1266 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1267 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1268 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001269
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001270C API
1271-----
1272
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001273- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1274 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1275 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1276 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1277 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1278 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1279 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1280 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1281 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1282 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1283 its visible semantics have not changed.
1284
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001285- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1286 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1287
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001288Documentation
1289-------------
1290
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001291- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001292
1293 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001294 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001295
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001296 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001297
1298 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1299
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001300- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001301
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001302Tests
1303-----
1304
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001305- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001306 platforms that use the Makefile.
1307
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001308- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1309 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1310 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1311
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001312
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001313What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1314=================================
1315
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001316*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001317
1318Core and builtins
1319-----------------
1320
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001321- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1322 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1323 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1324 objects now (one object instead of three).
1325
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001326- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1327 Windows DLLs.
1328
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001329- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1330 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001331
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001332- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1333 a new .pyc magic.
1334
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001335- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1336 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1337 be there.
1338
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001339- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1340 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1341 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1342
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001343- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1344 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1345 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1346
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001347- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1348
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001349- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1350 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1351 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001352
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001353- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1354 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1355
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001356- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1357
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001358- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001359 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001360
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001361- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1362
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001363- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1364
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001365- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1366 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1367
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001368- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1369 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1370 Fixes bug #858016 .
1371
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001372- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1373 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1374 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1375
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001376- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1377 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1378 improves their performance (about 35%).
1379
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001380- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1381 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1382 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1383
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001384- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1385 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1386 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1387 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1388
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001389- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1390 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001391 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001392 length is not known).
1393
1394- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1395 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001396 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1397 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001398 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1399
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001400- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1401 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1402
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001403- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1404 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1405 keyword arguments.
1406
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001407- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1408 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1409 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1410
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001411- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1412 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1413 cases.
1414
1415- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1416 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1417 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1418 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1419 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1420 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1421 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1422 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1423 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1424 a release build.
1425
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001426- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1427 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1428
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001429- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001430 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001431
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001432- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1433 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1434 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1435 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1436 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1437 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1438 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1439 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1440 destroyed.
1441
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001442- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1443 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1444 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1445 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1446 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1447 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1448 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1449 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1450
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001451- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1452 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1453 character other than a space.
1454
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001455- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1456 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1457 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1458 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1459 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1460 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1461 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1462 attributes with the same name.
1463
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001464- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1465 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1466 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1467 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1468 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1469 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1470 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1471 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1472 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1473 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1474 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1475 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1476 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1477 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001478
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001479- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1480 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1481 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1482 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1483 This has been repaired.
1484
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001485- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1486
1487- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1488
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001489- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1490 over a sequence.
1491
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001492- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001493 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001494
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001495- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1496
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001497- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1498 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1499 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1500 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1501 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1502 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1503 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1504 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1505
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001506- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1507 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1508 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1509
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001510- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1511 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1512 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1513 freelist.
1514
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001515- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1516 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1517
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001518- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1519 number.
1520
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001521- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1522 a TypeError exception.
1523
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001524- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1525 820195.
1526
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001527- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1528 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1529 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1530
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001531- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001532 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1533 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001534
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001535- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1536 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1537 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1538
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001539- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1540 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001541 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001542
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001543- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001544 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1545 the first call.
1546
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001547
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001548Extension modules
1549-----------------
1550
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001551- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1552 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1553
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001554- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1555 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1556 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1557 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1558 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1559 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1560 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001561
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001562- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1563
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001564- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1565
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001566- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1567 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1568
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001569- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1570 fewer false positives.
1571
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001572- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1573 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1574
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001575- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001576 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1577
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001578- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001579 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001580 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001581 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1582 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001583
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001584- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1585 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1586 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1587 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1588
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001589- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1590 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1591 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1592 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1593 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1594 #897625.
1595
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001596- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1597 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1598
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001599- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1600 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1601 and pops on either side of the deque.
1602
1603- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1604 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1605
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001606- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1607 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1608 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1609 other functions that expect a function argument.
1610
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001611- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1612
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001613- os.getsid was added.
1614
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001615- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1616 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1617 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1618
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001619- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1620
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001621- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1622
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001623- readline.clear_history was added.
1624
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001625- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1626
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001627- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1628
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001629- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1630
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001631- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1632
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001633- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1634
1635- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1636
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001637- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1638
1639- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1640
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001641- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1642 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1643 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1644
1645- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1646 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1647 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1648 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1649 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1650 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1651 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1652
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001653- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1654 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1655 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1656 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001657
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001658- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001659 iterators from a single iterable.
1660
1661- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1662 of raising a TypeError exception.
1663
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001664- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1665 as parameter.
1666
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001667Library
1668-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001669
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001670- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1671 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1672 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001673
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001674- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1675 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1676 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001677
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001678- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001679
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001680- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1681 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001682
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001683- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1684 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1685
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001686- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1687
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001688- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001689 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001690
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001691- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001692 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001693
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001694- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1695
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001696- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1697 on cygwin and mingw32.
1698
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001699- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1700
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001701- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1702 module.
1703
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001704- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1705 installation scheme for all platforms.
1706
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001707- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001708 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001709
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001710- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1711 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1712 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1713
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001714- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1715 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1716 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1717
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001718- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1719
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001720- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1721
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001722- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1723 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1724
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001725- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1726 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1727 type pattern with the same value exists.
1728
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001729- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1730 when run from the command prompt).
1731
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001732- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1733 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1734
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001735- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1736 default sort).
1737
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001738- Added global runctx function to profile module
1739
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001740- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1741
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001742- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1743
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001744- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1745
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001746- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001747 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1748 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1749 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1750 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1751 accordingly.
1752
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001753- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1754 decoding standards.
1755
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001756- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1757 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1758 called for all requests.
1759
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001760- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1761 they are passed to the compiler.
1762
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001763- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1764 indent, width and depth.
1765
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001766- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1767 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1768
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001769- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1770 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1771
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001772- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1773
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001774- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1775
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001776- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1777
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001778- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1779 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1780
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001781- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001782 for better performance.
1783
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001784- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001785
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001786- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1787 a string).
1788
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001789- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1790
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001791- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1792
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001793- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1794
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001795- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1796
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001797- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1798 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1799 list of fieldnames.
1800
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001801- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1802 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1803
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001804- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1805
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001806- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1807 empty lists.
1808
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001809- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1810 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1811 and shelves.
1812
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001813- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1814 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1815
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001816- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001817 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1818 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001819
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001820- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1821 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001822 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001823
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001824- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001825 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1826 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1827
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001828- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1829 and removed in Py2.4.
1830
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001831- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1832
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001833- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1834
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001835Tools/Demos
1836-----------
1837
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001838- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1839 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1840
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001841- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1842
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001843- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1844 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1845 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1846 destination in situations where both files are given.
1847
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001848- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1849 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1850 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1851 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1852
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001853- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1854
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001855- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1856 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1857 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1858 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1859 now.
1860
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001861- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1862 in effect
1863
1864- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1865 C-c C-h
1866
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001867- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1868 -d option was given.
1869
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001870Build
1871-----
1872
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001873- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1874 build under OS X.
1875
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001876- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1877 --enable-profiling.
1878
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001879- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1880 is configured --with-tsc.
1881
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001882- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1883 on AMD64.
1884
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001885- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1886 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1887
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001888- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1889 removed.
1890
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001891- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1892 supported (see PEP 11).
1893
1894- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1895
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001896- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1897
1898- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1899 (see PEP 11).
1900
1901- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1902 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1903
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001904C API
1905-----
1906
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001907- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1908 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1909 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1910
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001911- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1912 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1913 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1914 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1915
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001916- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1917 generator objects.
1918
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001919- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1920 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001921 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1922 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001923
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001924- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1925 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1926
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001927- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1928 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1929 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1930 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1931 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1932
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001933- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1934 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1935 about 10% faster.
1936
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001937- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1938 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1939
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001940- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1941 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1942 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1943 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1944
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001945Windows
1946-------
1947
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001948- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1949 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1950 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1951 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1952
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001953- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1954 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1955 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1956
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001957
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001958What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1959===============================
1960
1961*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1962
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001963IDLE
1964----
1965
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001966- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1967 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1968 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1969 context-menu actions.
1970
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001971- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1972 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1973 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1974 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1975 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1976 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1977 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1978 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1979 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1980
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001981
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001982What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1983=============================================
1984
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001985*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001986
1987Core and builtins
1988-----------------
1989
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001990- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001991 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001992 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1993
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001994Extension modules
1995-----------------
1996
1997- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1998 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1999 than once. This has been fixed.
2000
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002001- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2002 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2003 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2004 call.
2005
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002006- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2007
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002008Library
2009-------
2010
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002011- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2012 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2013
2014- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2015 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2016 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2017 restored.
2018
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002019IDLE
2020----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002021
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002022- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002023
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002024Build
2025-----
2026
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002027- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2028 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2029
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002030C API
2031-----
2032
2033Windows
2034-------
2035
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002036- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2037 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2038
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002039- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2040
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002041Mac
2042---
2043
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002044- Various fixes to pimp.
2045
2046- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2047
2048- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2049 more problems than it solves.
2050
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002051
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002052What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2053=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002054
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002055*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2056
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002057Core and builtins
2058-----------------
2059
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002060- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2061 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2062
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002063- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2064 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002065 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002066
2067- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2068 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2069 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002070 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002071
2072- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2073 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002074
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002075- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2076 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2077 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2078
2079- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002080 770247.
2081
2082- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002083
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002084Extension modules
2085-----------------
2086
2087- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2088 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2089
2090- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2091
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002092- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2093
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002094- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2095 contained within the _strptime module.
2096
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002097- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2098 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2099
2100- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002101 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2102
2103- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2104 the find_class attribute, if present.
2105
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002106- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002107
2108 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2109 (SF bug 763298).
2110
2111 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002112 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2113 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2114 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002115
2116 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2117
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002118Library
2119-------
2120
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002121- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2122
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002123- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2124 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2125 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2126 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2127 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2128 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2129 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2130 or Tester().
2131
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002132- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2133 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2134 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2135 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2136 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2137 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2138 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2139 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2140 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002141
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002142 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002143
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002144- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2145 weren't before was an oversight.
2146
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002147- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2148 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2149
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002150- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2151 when there are no lines.
2152
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002153- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2154 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2155
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002156- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2157 to child processes.
2158
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002159- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2160
2161- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2162
2163- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2164 xmlrpclib.
2165
2166- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2167 responses.
2168
2169- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2170 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2171
2172- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2173 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2174 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2175
2176- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2177 used as patterns.
2178
2179- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2180 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2181 than Tk 8.3.
2182
2183- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2184
2185- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002186
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002187Tools/Demos
2188-----------
2189
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002190- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2191
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002192- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2193
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002194- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002195
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002196Build
2197-----
2198
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002199- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2200
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002201- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2202
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002203- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2204 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002205
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002206- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2207 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2208 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002209
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002210C API
2211-----
2212
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002213- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2214 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2215
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002216Windows
2217-------
2218
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002219- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2220 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2221 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2222 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2223 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2224 Python exception ::
2225
2226 thread.error: can't start new thread
2227
2228 is raised now.
2229
2230- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2231 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2232 instead of from DLL teardown.
2233
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002234Mac
2235---
2236
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002237- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002238 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002239 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2240 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2241 the executable in the bundle.
2242
2243- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002244
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002245- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2246
2247- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2248 on Panther.
2249
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002250What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2251================================
2252
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002253*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002254
2255Core and builtins
2256-----------------
2257
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002258- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2259 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2260 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2261 with the -i option.
2262
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002263- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2264 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2265
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002266- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2267 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2268
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002269- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2270 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2271 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2272 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2273 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2274 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2275 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2276 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2277 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2278 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2279 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2280 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2281 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002282
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002283- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2284 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2285 embedded in a lambda expression.
2286
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002287- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2288 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2289 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2290 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2291 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2292
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002293- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2294 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2295 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2296
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002297- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2298 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2299
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002300- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2301 It's writable again.
2302
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002303- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2304 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2305 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002306 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002307
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002308- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2309 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2310 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2311
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002312Extension modules
2313-----------------
2314
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002315- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2316 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2317
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002318- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2319 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2320 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2321 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2322
2323- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2324 collection.
2325
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002326- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2327 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2328 unique within a single program run.
2329
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002330- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2331 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2332
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002333- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2334 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2335
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002336- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2337 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002338
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002339- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2340
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002341- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2342 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2343
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002344- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2345 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2346 for many BSD-derived systems.
2347
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002348
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002349Library
2350-------
2351
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002352- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2353 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2354 primary ones:
2355
2356 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2357 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2358 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2359
2360 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2361 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2362 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2363 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2364 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2365 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2366
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002367- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2368 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2369 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2370 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2371 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2372 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2373 argument.
2374
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002375- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2376 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2377 in the archive.
2378
2379- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2380 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2381
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002382- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2383 569574).
2384
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002385- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2386 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2387 no more.
2388
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002389- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2390 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2391 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2392 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2393 code coverage.
2394
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002395- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2396 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2397 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002398 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2399 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002400
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002401- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2402 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2403 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002404 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002405
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002406- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2407
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002408- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2409 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2410 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2411 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2412
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002413- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2414 handling.
2415
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002416- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2417 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2418
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002419- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2420 in socket.py.
2421
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002422- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2423
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002424- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2425 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2426 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2427 opener with proxy support.
2428
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002429- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2430
2431- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2432
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002433Tools/Demos
2434-----------
2435
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002436- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2437
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002438- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2439
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002440- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2441 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002442
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002443- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2444 files.
2445
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002446Build
2447-----
2448
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002449- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002450 different root directory.
2451
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002452C API
2453-----
2454
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002455- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2456 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2457 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2458 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2459 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2460 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2461 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2462 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2463 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2464 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2465
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002466- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2467 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2468 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2469 from Python.
2470
2471
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002472New platforms
2473-------------
2474
2475None this time.
2476
2477Tests
2478-----
2479
2480- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2481 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2482
2483Windows
2484-------
2485
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002486- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2487
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002488- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2489 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2490 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2491 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2492 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2493 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2494 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2495 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2496 that's what it's for.
2497
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002498Mac
2499---
2500
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002501- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2502 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2503 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2504 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002505- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2506 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2507- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002508
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002509SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2510------------------------------------
2511
2512430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2513598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2514622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2515661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2516683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2517697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2518713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2519724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2520727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2521729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2522730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2523731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2524732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2525733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2526735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2527740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2528744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2529745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2530747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2531749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2532751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2533753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2534755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2535757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2536760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2537
2538
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002539What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2540================================
2541
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002542*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002543
2544Core and builtins
2545-----------------
2546
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002547- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2548 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2549
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002550- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2551 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2552 and cannot be strings).
2553
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002554- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2555 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2556 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2557 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2558
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002559- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2560 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2561 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2562 Python itself.
2563
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002564- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2565 the referenced object, if it has one.
2566
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002567- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2568 the thread started at
2569 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2570
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002571- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2572 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2573 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2574 placed on a list index.
2575
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002576- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2577 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2578 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2579 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2580
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002581- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2582 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2583 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2584 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2585 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2586 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2587 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2588
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002589- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2590 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2591 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2592 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2593 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2594
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002595- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2596 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002597
2598- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2599 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2600 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2601 #693195.)
2602
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002603- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2604 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002605
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002606- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002607 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002608 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2609 interpreter executions, would fail.
2610
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002611- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002612 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002613 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002614
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002615Extension modules
2616-----------------
2617
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002618- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2619 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2620 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2621 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2622
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002623- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2624 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2625
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002626- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2627 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2628 and Greg Chapman.)
2629
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002630- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2631 recursively.
2632
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002633- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002634 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2635 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2636 leaks.
2637
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002638- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2639
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002640- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2641 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2642 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2643 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2644 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2645 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2646 #705836.
2647
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002648- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002649 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2650
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002651- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2652 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2653 See SF bug #692416.
2654
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002655- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2656 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2657
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002658- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2659 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2660 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002661
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002662- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002663 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2664 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2665
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002666- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2667 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2668 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2669 timeouts to work properly.
2670
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002671Library
2672-------
2673
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002674- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2675 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2676 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2677 future release.
2678
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002679- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2680 for querying platform dependent features.
2681
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002682- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002683
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002684- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2685 pickle protocol versions.
2686
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002687- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2688 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2689 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2690
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002691- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2692
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002693- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2694 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2695 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2696 modules.
2697
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002698- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2699 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2700 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2701
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002702- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2703 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2704
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002705- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2706 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2707 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2708
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002709- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002710 MS Office extensions.
2711
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002712- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2713 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2714
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002715- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2716 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2717
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002718- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2719 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2720 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2721 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2722 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2723 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2724
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002725- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2726 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2727 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002728
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002729- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2730 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2731 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2732
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002733- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2734
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002735- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2736 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2737 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2738
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002739Tools/Demos
2740-----------
2741
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002742- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2743 See the module docstring for details.
2744
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002745Build
2746-----
2747
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002748- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2749 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002750
2751C API
2752-----
2753
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002754- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2755
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002756- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2757 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2758 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2759
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002760- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2761 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002762
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002763 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2764 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2765 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002766
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002767- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002768 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2769
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002770- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2771 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2772 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002773
2774New platforms
2775-------------
2776
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002777None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002778
2779Tests
2780-----
2781
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002782- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2783 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002784
2785Windows
2786-------
2787
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002788- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2789 function.
2790
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002791- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2792 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002793
2794Mac
2795---
2796
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002797- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2798 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002799
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002800- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2801 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002802
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002803- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2804 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2805 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002806
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002807- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002808 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2809 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002810
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002811- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2812 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002813
2814
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002815What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2816=================================
2817
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002818*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002819
2820Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002821-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002822
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002823- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2824 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2825 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2826
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002827- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2828 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2829 (SF patch #664376.)
2830
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002831- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2832 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2833 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2834 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2835 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2836 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002837 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002838
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002839- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2840 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2841 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2842 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002843 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002844
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002845- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2846 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2847 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2848 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2849 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2850 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2851 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2852 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2853 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2854 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2855 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2856
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002857- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2858 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2859 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2860 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2861 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2862 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2863
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002864- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2865 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2866
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002867- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2868 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2869 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2870 case.)
2871
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002872- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2873 passed as unicode strings.
2874
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002875- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2876 See SF bug #683467.
2877
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002878- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2879 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2880
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002881- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2882
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002883- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2884
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002885- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2886 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2887 arguments.
2888
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002889- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2890 See SF bug #667147.
2891
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002892- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002893 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002894 See SF bug #676155.
2895
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002896- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002897 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002898 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2899 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2900 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2901 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2902 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2903 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002904
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002905Extension modules
2906-----------------
2907
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002908- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2909 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2910 tp_as_number pointer.
2911
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002912- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2913 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2914 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2915 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2916 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2917
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002918- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2919
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002920- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2921
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002922- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002923 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002924 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2925 patch #678531.)
2926
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002927- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2928 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2929
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002930- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2931 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2932
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002933- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2934
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002935- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2936 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2937 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2938
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002939- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2940
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002941- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2942 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2943
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002944- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002945
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002946- datetime changes:
2947
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002948 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2949
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002950 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2951 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2952 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2953 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2954 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2955 now.
2956
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002957 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002958 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2959 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002960
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002961 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002962 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002963 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2964 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2965 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2966 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002967
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002968 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2969 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2970 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002971 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2972
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002973 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2974 by a later example coded by Guido.
2975
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002976 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002977 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2978 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2979 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002980 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2981 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2982
2983 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2984 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2985 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2986 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2987 tzinfo subclass instance.
2988
2989 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2990 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2991 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2992 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2993 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2994 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2995 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2996 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002997
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002998 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2999 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3000 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3001 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3002 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003003 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3004
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003005 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003006
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003007 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3008 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3009 as a naive datetime object.
3010
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003011 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3012 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3013 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3014
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003015 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3016 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3017 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3018 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3019 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3020 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3021 comparison.
3022
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003023 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3024 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3025 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3026 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003027 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003028
3029 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003030
3031 and ::
3032
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003033 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3034
3035 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3036 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3037 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3038 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3039
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003040 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3041 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3042 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3043 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3044 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3045
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003046 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3047 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003048 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3049 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003050
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003051Library
3052-------
3053
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003054- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3055 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3056
3057- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3058 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3059 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3060 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3061 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3062 See PEP 307 for details.
3063
3064- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3065 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3066
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003067- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3068 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003069 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003070 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3071 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003072 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003073
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003074- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3075 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3076
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003077- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3078 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3079 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3080
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003081- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3082
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003083- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3084 exception.
3085
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003086- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3087 class.
3088
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003089- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3090 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3091 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3092
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003093- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3094 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3095
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003096- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003097 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3098 See SF bug #659228.
3099
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003100- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3101 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3102 See SF patch #651082.
3103
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003104- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003105
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003106- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3107 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3108
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003109- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003110 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003111
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003112- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3113 DOS paths from other platforms.
3114
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003115Tools/Demos
3116-----------
3117
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003118- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3119 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3120 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3121 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3122 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3123 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3124 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3125 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3126 example:
3127
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003128 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3129 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003130
3131 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3132
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003133
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003134Build
3135-----
3136
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003137- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3138 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3139 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003140 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3141
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003142 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3143
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003144- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3145 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3146 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3147 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3148 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3149 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3150 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3151 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3152 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3153
3154- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3155 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3156 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3157 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3158
3159- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3160 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3161
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003162C API
3163-----
3164
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003165- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3166 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003167
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003168- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3169 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3170 tp_as_number pointer.
3171
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003172- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3173 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3174 (SF #681367)
3175
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003176- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3177 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3178 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3179 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003180
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003181Tests
3182-----
3183
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003184- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003185 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3186 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3187 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3188 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3189 pydoc.)
3190
3191- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3192
3193- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003194
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003195Windows
3196-------
3197
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003198- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3199 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3200 time).
3201
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003202- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3203 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3204
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003205- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3206 release without strong cryptography.
3207
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003208- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003209 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003210
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003211- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3212 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3213
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003214Mac
3215---
3216
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003217- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3218 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003219
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003220- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3221 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3222 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003223
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003224- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3225 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003226
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003227- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3228 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3229 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3230 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003231
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003232- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003233 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3234 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3235 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003236
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003237
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003238What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003239=================================
3240
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003241*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003242
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003243Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003244--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003245
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003246- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3247
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003248- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3249 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003250 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003251 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003252 a different meaning than before.
3253
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003254- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003255 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003256 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003257
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003258- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003259 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003260 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003261
3262- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3263 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3264 and deallocation.
3265
3266- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3267 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3268
3269- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3270 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3271 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3272 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3273 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3274
3275- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3276 now detected by the garbage collector.
3277
3278- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3279 [SF bug 519621]
3280
3281- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3282 identifier.
3283
3284- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3285 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3286 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3287 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3288 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3289 [SF bug 563060]
3290
3291- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3292 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3293 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3294 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3295 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3296
3297- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3298 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3299 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3300
3301- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3302
3303- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3304 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3305 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3306 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3307 state of the slots would be lost.)
3308
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003309Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003310-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003311
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003312- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003313 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3314 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3315 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3316 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003317 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3318 Jython 2.1.
3319
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003320- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003321 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003322 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3323 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3324 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3325 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3326 these, see PEP 302.
3327
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003328- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3329 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3330 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3331
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003332- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3333 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3334 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3335
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003336- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3337 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3338 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3339
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003340- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3341 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3342 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3343 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3344 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3345 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3346 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3347 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3348 releases or implementations.
3349
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003350- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003351 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3352 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003353
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003354- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3355 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3356
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003357- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3358 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3359 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3360
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003361- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3362 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3363
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003364- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3365 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003366 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3367 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003368
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003369- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3370 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3371 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3372 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3373 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3374
3375 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3376 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3377 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3378 pattern.
3379
3380 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3381 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3382 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3383 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3384
3385 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3386 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3387 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3388 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3389 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3390 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3391
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003392- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3393 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3394 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3395 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3396 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3397 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3398 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3399 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003400
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003401- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3402 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3403 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3404 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3405 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003406 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3407 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3408 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3409 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3410 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3411 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3412 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003413
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003414- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3415 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3416
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003417- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3418 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3419 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3420 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3421 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3422 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3423 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3424 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3425 to Zack Weinberg!
3426
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003427- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3428 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3429 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3430 type. This has been fixed now.
3431
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003432- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3433 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3434 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3435
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003436- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3437 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3438 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3439 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3440 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3441 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3442 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3443 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003444 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003445
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003446- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3447 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3448 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003449
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003450- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3451 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3452 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3453 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3454 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3455 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3456 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3457 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003458 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003459 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3460 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3461
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003462- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3463 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3464 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3465 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3466 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3467 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3468 this.)
3469
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003470- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3471 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003472 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003473 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003474 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3475 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003476 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3477 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003478
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003479- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3480 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3481 currently running.
3482
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003483- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3484 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3485 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3486 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3487
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003488- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3489 as directory names.
3490
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003491- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3492 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3493
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003494- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3495 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3496
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003497- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003498 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3499 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003500
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003501- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3502 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3503 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3504 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3505 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3506
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003507- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3508 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3509 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3510 removed.
3511
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003512- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3513 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3514 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3515
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003516- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3517 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3518 to __debug__.
3519
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003520- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3521 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3522 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3523
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003524- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3525 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3526 deprecated now.
3527
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003528- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3529 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3530 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003531
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003532- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3533 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3534 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3535 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3536 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003537
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003538- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3539 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3540
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003541- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3542 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3543 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003544 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003545 is backward compatible.
3546
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003547- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3548 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3549 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3550 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3551 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3552
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003553- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3554 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3555 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3556 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3557 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3558 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003559
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003560- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3561 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3562
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003563- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3564 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3565
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003566- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3567 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3568 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3569 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3570 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3571
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003572- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3573 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3574 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3575
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003576- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003577 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3578
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003579- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3580 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3581 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003582
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003583- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3584 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3585
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003586- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3587 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3588 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3589
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003590- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3591
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003592Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003593-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003594
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003595- Added three operators to the operator module:
3596 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3597 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3598 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3599
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003600- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3601
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003602- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3603 archives.
3604
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003605- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3606 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3607 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3608
3609 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3610
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003611- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3612 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3613 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003614 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003615
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003616- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3617 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3618 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3619 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003620 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3621 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3622 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3623 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003624
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003625- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3626 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003627
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003628- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3629
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003630- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3631 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3632
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003633- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3634 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3635 supported.
3636
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003637- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3638
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003639- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3640 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003641
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003642- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3643 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3644
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003645- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3646
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003647- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3648 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3649
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003650- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3651 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3652 functions but callable type objects.
3653
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003654- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003655 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003656 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003657
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003658- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3659 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003660
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003661- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3662 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003663
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003664- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3665 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3666 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3667 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3668
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003669- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3670 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003671
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003672- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3673 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3674 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3675 and __imul__.
3676
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003677- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003678 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3679 is called.
3680
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003681- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3682 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3683 interpreter was compiled.
3684
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003685- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3686 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3687 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003688 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003689 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3690 1, not 2.
3691
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003692- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3693 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3694 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3695 limit.
3696
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003697- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3698 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3699 bug #623464.
3700
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003701- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3702 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3703 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3704 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3705
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003706Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003707-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003708
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003709- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3710
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003711- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3712 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3713 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3714 with Python 2.3a2.
3715
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003716- os.path exposes getctime.
3717
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003718- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003719 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003720 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003721 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003722 unit tests of floating point results.
3723
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003724- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3725 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3726 has been increased.
3727
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003728- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3729 executed.
3730
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003731- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3732 postinstallation script.
3733
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003734- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3735 test the current module.
3736
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003737- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003738 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3739 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3740 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3741 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3742
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003743- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003744 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003745 Ward's Optik package.
3746
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003747- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3748 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3749 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3750 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3751
3752- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3753 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003754 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003755
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003756- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3757 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3758 shelf are binary pickles.
3759
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003760- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3761 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3762
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003763- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3764 modules are iterators now.
3765
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003766- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3767 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3768 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3769 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3770 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3771 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003772
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003773- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3774 with their entity value.
3775
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003776- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3777
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003778- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3779 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003780
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003781- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3782 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003783 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003784
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003785- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3786 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3787 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3788 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3789 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3790 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3791 main():
3792
3793 import locale
3794 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3795
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003796- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3797 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3798
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003799- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3800 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3801 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3802 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3803 to the new standard.
3804
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003805- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3806 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3807 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3808 an extension to the database.
3809
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003810- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3811 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3812 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3813 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003814 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003815
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003816- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003817 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003818
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003819- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3820 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3821 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3822 bounded integers.
3823
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003824- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3825 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3826 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3827 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3828 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3829 in existence.
3830
3831 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3832 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3833 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3834 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3835 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3836 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3837
3838 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3839 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3840 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3841 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3842
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003843- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3844 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3845 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3846
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003847- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3848
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003849- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3850 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3851 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3852 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3853
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003854- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3855 argument.
3856
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003857- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3858 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3859 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3860 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3861 [SF patch 560794].
3862
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003863- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3864 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3865 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003866 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3867 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3868 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003869
3870- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3871 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003872
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003873- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3874 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3875 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3876 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003877
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003878- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3879 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3880 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3881 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3882 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3883
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003884- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003885
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003886- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3887
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003888- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3889 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3890 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3891 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3892 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3893 identical to None.
3894
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003895- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3896 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3897 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3898 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3899 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3900 results now.
3901
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003902- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3903 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3904
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003905- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3906 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3907 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3908 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3909 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3910 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3911 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3912 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3913
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003914- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3915
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003916- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3917 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3918
3919- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3920 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3921 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3922 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3923 and other systems.
3924
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003925- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3926 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3927 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3928 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 +00003929 work well with these.
3930
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003931- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3932
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003933- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003934 connections.
3935
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003936- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3937 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3938 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3939
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003940- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3941 sets
3942
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003943- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3944 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3945 name.
3946
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003947- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3948 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3949 passed in.
3950
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003951- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003952 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003953 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3954 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003955
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003956- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3957
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003958- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3959
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003960- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3961 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3962 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3963
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003964- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3965 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3966 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3967 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003968 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003969
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003970- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003971 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003972 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003973
3974- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3975 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3976 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3977
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003978- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003979 the value of its expression argument.
3980
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003981- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3982 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3983 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3984
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003985- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3986 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3987 skipstone browser was included.
3988
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003989- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3990 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3991
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003992Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003993-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003994
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003995- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3996 names in addition to accepting file names.
3997
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003998- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3999 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4000 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4001 still used and useful.)
4002
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004003- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4004 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4005 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4006 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004007
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004008- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4009 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4010 the generated binary.
4011
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004012Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004013-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004014
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004015- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4016
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004017- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4018 except in the hands of experts.
4019
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004020- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004021 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4022 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4023 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004024
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004025- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4026 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4027 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4028 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4029 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4030 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4031 builds.
4032
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004033- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4034 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4035 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4036 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4037 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4038 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4039 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4040 new type.
4041
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004042- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004043
4044 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4045 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4046 positive infinities.
4047
4048 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4049 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4050 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4051 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4052 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4053 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4054 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4055
4056 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4057
4058 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4059
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004060- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4061 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4062 size of the executable.
4063
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004064- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4065 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4066 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4067 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004068
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004069- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4070
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004071- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4072 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4073 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004074
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004075- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4076 well as Unix.
4077
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004078- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4079 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4080 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4081 modules in the README file for details.
4082
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004083C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004084-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004085
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004086- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4087 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004088 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004089 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004090 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004091
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004092- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4093 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4094 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4095 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4096 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4097 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004098 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004099 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4100 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4101 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4102 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4103 aligned.)
4104
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004105- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4106 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4107 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4108
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004109- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4110 level.
4111
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004112- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4113 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4114 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4115 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4116 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4117
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004118- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4119 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4120 code.
4121
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004122- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4123 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4124 adjusting for negative indices.
4125
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004126- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4127 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4128 object.
4129
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004130- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4131 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4132 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4133
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004134- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4135 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004136
4137- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4138
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004139- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4140 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4141 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4142 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4143
4144- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4145
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004146- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004147
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004148- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004149 without going through the buffer API.
4150
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004151- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004152
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004153- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4154 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4155 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4156 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4157
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004158- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4159 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4160
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004161- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004162 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4163
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004164New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004165-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004166
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004167- OpenVMS is now supported.
4168
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004169- AtheOS is now supported.
4170
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004171- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4172
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004173- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4174
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004175Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004176-----
4177
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004178- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4179 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4180 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004181
4182Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004183-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004184
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004185- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4186 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4187 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4188 bugs.
4189 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004190 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004191 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4192 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004193 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004194
4195- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004196 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004197
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004198- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4199 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4200
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004201- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4202 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004203 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004204 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4205
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004206- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4207 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4208 use files" uninstall option).
4209
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004210- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4211
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004212- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4213 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4214
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004215- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4216 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4217 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4218
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004219- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4220 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4221 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4222 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4223 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004224 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4225 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4226 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004227
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004228- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004229 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004230 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4231 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4232 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4233 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4234 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4235 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4236 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4237 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4238 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4239 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4240 work around.
4241
4242- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4243 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4244 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4245 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4246 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4247 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4248 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4249 specified with O_CREAT too).
4250
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004251Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004252----
4253
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004254- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004255
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004256- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4257 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4258 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4259
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004260- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4261 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4262 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4263
4264- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4265 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4266 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4267 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4268 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4269 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4270 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4271 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004272
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004273- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4274 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4275 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004276
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004277- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4278 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4279 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4280 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4281 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004282
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004283- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4284 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4285 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004286
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004287- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4288 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004289
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004290- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4291 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4292 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4293 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4294 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004295
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004296- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4297 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4298 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4299
4300- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4301 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4302 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004303
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004304- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4305 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4306 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4307 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004308 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004309
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004310- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4311 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004312
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004313- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4314 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004315
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004316- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004317 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004318 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4319 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004320
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004321
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004322What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004323===============================
4324
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004325*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4326
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004327Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004328--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004329
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004330- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4331 with a custom metaclass.
4332
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004333Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004334-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004335
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004336- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4337 are proxies.
4338
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004339Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004340-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004341
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004342- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4343 very short strings.
4344
4345- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4346 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4347 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4348 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4349 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4350
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004351Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004352-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004353
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004354- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4355 close or delete time).
4356
4357- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4358 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4359
4360- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4361
4362- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004363 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004364
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004365Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004366-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004367
4368Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004369-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004370
4371C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004372-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004373
4374New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004375-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004376
4377Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004378-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004379
4380Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004381-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004382
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004383- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4384
4385- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4386 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4387
4388- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4389 deleted at process exit time.
4390
4391- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4392 in backslash.
4393
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004394Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004395----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004396
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004397- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4398 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4399 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4400
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004401
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004402What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004403===========================
4404
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004405*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4406
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004407Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004408--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004409
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004410- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4411 been extensively updated. See
4412
4413 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4414
4415 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4416
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004417- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4418 deleted!
4419
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004420- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4421 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4422 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4423 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4424 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4425
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004426- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4427
4428 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4429 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4430
4431 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4432 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4433 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4434 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4435 supported anyway.
4436
4437 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4438 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4439
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004440- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4441 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4442 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4443 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4444 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004445
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004446- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4447 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4448 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4449
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004450Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004451-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004452
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004453- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4454 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4455 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4456 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4457 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4458 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004459 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4460 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4461 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4462 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004463
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004464- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4465 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4466 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4467
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004468Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004469-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004470
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004471- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4472
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004473Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004474-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004475
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004476- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4477 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4478 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4479 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4480 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4481 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4482
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004483- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4484
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004485- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4486
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004487- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4488
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004489- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4490 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4491 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4492
4493- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4494
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004495Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004496-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004497
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004498- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4499 off a search on Google.
4500
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004501Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004502-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004503
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004504- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4505 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4506 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4507 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4508 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4509 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4510 other platforms should do likewise.
4511
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004512- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4513 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4514 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4515
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004516C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004517-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004518
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004519- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4520 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4521 producing key-value pairs.
4522
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004523- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004524 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004525 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4526 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4527 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4528 previously went unchallenged.
4529
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004530New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004531-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004532
4533Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004534-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004535
4536Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004537-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004538
4539Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004541
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004542- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4543 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004544
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004545- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4546 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4547 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4548 home.
4549
4550
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004551What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004552===========================
4553
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004554*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4555
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004556Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004557--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004558
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004559- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4560 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004561
4562 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004563 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004564
4565 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4566 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004567 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004568 This needs to be documented.
4569
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004570- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4571 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4572
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004573- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4574 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4575 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4576
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004577- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4578 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4579
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004580- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4581 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4582 class forbids it).
4583
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004584- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4585 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4586 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4587
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004588- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4589
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004590Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004591-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004592
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004593- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4594 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004595 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004596
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004597- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4598 (like 1 + '').
4599
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004600Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004601-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004602
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004603- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4604 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4605 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4606 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004607 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004608 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4609
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004610- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4611 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4612 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4613 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4614
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004615- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4616 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004617 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4618 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4619 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004620
4621- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4622 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004623
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004624- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4625 bytes on its input.
4626
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004627Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004628-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004629
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004630- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004631 convenience function.
4632
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004633- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4634 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4635 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004636 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4637 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4638 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4639 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4640 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4641 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004642
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004643- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4644 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4645 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4646 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4647
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004648- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4649 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4650 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4651
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004652- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4653 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4654 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4655 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4656
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004657- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4658 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004659 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004660 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4661 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4662 new -l and -e options.
4663
4664- statcache is now deprecated.
4665
4666- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4667 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004668 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004669 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4670 time properly taken into account.
4671
4672- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4673 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4674 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4675 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4676
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004677Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004678-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004679
4680Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004681-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004682
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004683- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4684 is built with libdb3 if available.
4685
4686- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4687
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004688C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004689-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004690
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004691- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4692 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4693 PySequence_Size().
4694
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004695- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4696
4697- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4698 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4699 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4700
4701- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4702 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4703
4704- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4705 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4706
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004707New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004708-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004709
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004710- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4711 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4712
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004713- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4714 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4715
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004716- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4717
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004718Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004719-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004720
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004721- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4722 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4723
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004724Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004725-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004726
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004727Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004728----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004729
4730- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4731 removed completely in the next release.
4732
4733- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4734 OSX.
4735
4736- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4737 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4738
4739- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4740
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004741
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004742What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004743===========================
4744
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004745*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4746
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004747Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004748--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004749
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004750- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004751 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004752 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004753 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4754 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004755 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4756 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004757 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4758 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004759
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004760- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4761 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4762
4763- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4764 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4765
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004766Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004767-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004768
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004769- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4770 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4771 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4772 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4773 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4774 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4775 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4776 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4777
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004778- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4779 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4780 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4781 example).
4782
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004783- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004784 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004785 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004786 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004787
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004788- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4789 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4790 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004791 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004792
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004793- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4794 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4795 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4796 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4797 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4798 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4799
4800 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4801
4802 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4803
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004804Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004805-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004806
4807- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4808
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004809- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4810
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004811- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4812 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004813
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004814- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4815 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4816 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4817 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4818 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4819 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004820 attributes.
4821
4822- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4823 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4824 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004825
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004826- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4827 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4828 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004829
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004830- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4831 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4832 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004833 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4834 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4835
4836- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4837 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004838
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004839Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004840-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004841
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004842- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4843 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4844
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004845- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4846 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4847 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4848 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4849
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004850- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4851 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4852 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4853 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4854
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004855 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4856 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4857 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4858 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4859 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4860 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4861 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4862 without losing information).
4863
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004864- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004865 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4866 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4867 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4868 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4869 module).
4870
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004871 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004872 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4873 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4874 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4875 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004876
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004877- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004878 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4879 encoding.
4880
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004881- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4882 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4883
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004884- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004885 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4886
4887- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4888 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4889 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4890 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4891
4892- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4893
4894- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4895 ON, and OFF.
4896
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004897- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4898 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4899
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004900Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004901-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004902
4903- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4904 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4905 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004906
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004907- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4908 been added: -X and -E.
4909
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004910Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004911-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004912
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004913- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4914 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4915
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004916C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004917-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004918
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004919- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4920 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4921 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4922 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4923 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4924
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004925- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4926 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4927 as long) arguments.
4928
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004929- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4930 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4931 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4932 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4933 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4934 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4935
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004936- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4937 input.
4938
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004939New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004940-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004941
4942Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004943-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004944
4945Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004946-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004947
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004948- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4949 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4950 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4951
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004952- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4953 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4954 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004955 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004956
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004957 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4958 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4959 import signal
4960 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004961
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004962 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004963 while 1:
4964 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004965 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004966 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4967 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4968 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4969 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004970
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004971
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004972What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4973===========================
4974
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004975*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4976
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004977Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004978--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004979
4980- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4981 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4982 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4983
4984- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4985 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4986 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4987 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4988 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4989 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4990 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004991
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004992- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004993 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004994 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4995 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4996 associate a docstring with a property.
4997
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004998- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4999 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5000 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5001 other built-in object types.
5002
5003- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5004 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5005 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5006 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5007 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5008
5009- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5010 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5011
5012- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5013 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005014 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005015 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5016 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5017 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5018 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5019 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5020
5021- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5022 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5023 class.
5024
5025- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5026 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5027 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5028 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5029
5030- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5031 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5032 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5033 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5034
5035- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5036 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5037
5038- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5039 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5040 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5041 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5042 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005043 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005044 with the same value as s.
5045
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005046- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5047
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005048Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005049----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005050
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005051- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5052
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005053- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5054 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5055 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5056 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5057 objects.
5058
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005059- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5060 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005061 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5062 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5063
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005064- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5065 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5066 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5067
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005068Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005069-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005070
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005071- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5072 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5073 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5074 by the instances.
5075
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005076- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5077 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5078 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5079
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005080- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5081 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5082 before the entire comparison is complete.
5083
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005084- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5085 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5086 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5087
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005088- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5089 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5090 getwriter().
5091
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005092- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5093 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5094
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005095- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005096 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5097 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5098
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005099- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5100 iterable object.
5101
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005102- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5103 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005104
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005105- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5106 authentication.
5107
5108- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5109 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005110
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005111- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005112 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5113 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5114 a sample driver.)
5115
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005116Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005117-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005118
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005119- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5120 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5121 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5122 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5123 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5124 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5125 kernel has large file support.
5126
5127- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5128 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5129 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5130 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5131 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5132
5133- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5134 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5135 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5136
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005137C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005138-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005139
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005140- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5141 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5142
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005143New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005144-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005145
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005146- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5147 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5148
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005149Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005150-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005151
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005152- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5153 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5154 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5155 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5156 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5157
5158- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5159 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5160 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5161 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5162
5163- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5164 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5165
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005166Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005167-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005168
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005169- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005170 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5171 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005172
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005173
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005174What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5175===========================
5176
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005177*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5178
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005179Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005180----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005181
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005182- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5183 big to represent as a C double.
5184
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005185- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5186 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5187 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5188 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5189 restriction).
5190
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005191- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5192 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5193 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5194 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5195 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5196
5197 >>> dir([])
5198 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5199 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5200 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5201 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5202 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5203 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5204 'reverse', 'sort']
5205
5206 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5207
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005208- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005209 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5210 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5211 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5212 OverflowError exception.
5213
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005214- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005215 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005216 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5217 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5218 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5219 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5220 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005221 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005222 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5223 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5224
5225 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5226 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5227 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5228 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005229
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005230- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005231 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5232 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5233 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5234 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5235 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5236 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5237 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5238 once it is created.
5239
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005240- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5241 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5242 (key, value) pairs.
5243
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005244- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005245 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5246 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5247
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005248- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5249 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5250 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5251 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5252 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005253
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005254- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005255 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5256 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5257
5258 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5259
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005260- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005261 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5262
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005263Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005264-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005265
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005266- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005267 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5268 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005269
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005270- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5271 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5272 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5273 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5274 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5275 in this area anymore).
5276
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005277- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5278 threading.Timer.
5279
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005280- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5281 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5282
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005283- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005284 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5285
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005286- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005287 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5288 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5289 converted to Python longs.
5290
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005291- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005292 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5293
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005294- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5295 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5296 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5297
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005298Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005299-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005300
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005301- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5302 division operators as per PEP 238.
5303
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005304Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005305-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005306
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005307- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5308 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5309 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5310 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5311
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005312C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005313-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005314
5315- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005316
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005317- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5318 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005319 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005320
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005321 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5322 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005323 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005324 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005325
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005326- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005327 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5328 module:
5329
5330 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005331
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005332 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5333 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005334
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005335 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5336 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005337
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005338 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5339
5340 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5341
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005342- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005343 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5344 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5345 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005346
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005347New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005348-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005349
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005350- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5351 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5352 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5353 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5354 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005355
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005356Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005357-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005358
5359Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005360-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005361
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005362- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5363 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5364 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5365 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005366 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5367 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5368 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5369 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5370 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005371
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005372- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005373 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5374
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005375
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005376What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5377===========================
5378
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005379*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5380
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005381Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005382-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005383
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005384- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5385 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5386
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005387- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5388 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5389 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005390
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005391- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5392 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5393 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5394 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005395
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005396- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5397
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005398- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005399
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005400Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005401-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005402
5403- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005404 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005405 the module docstring for details.
5406
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005407Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005408-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005409
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005410- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005411 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5412 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5413 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005414
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005415- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5416 Nick Mathewson.
5417
5418Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005419----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005420
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005421- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5422 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5423 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5424 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5425 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5426 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5427 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5428 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5429
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005430- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5431 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5432 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5433 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5434
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005435- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5436 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5437 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5438 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5439 come a long way).
5440
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005441- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5442 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5443 write filters for these warnings).
5444
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005445- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5446 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5447 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5448 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5449 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5450
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005451- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5452 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5453 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5454 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5455 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5456 older distribution.
5457
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005458Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005459-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005460
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005461- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5462 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005463 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005464
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005465- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5466 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5467 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5468
5469- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5470
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005471- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5472
5473- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5474
5475- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5476
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005477- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005478
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005479- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5480
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005481New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005482-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005483
5484C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005485-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005486
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005487- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5488 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5489 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5490 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5491 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5492 against buffer overruns.
5493
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005494- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005495 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5496 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005497 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5498 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5499 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5500
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005501- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5502 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5503 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5504 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5505 deprecated.
5506
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005507Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005508-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005509
5510- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5511 relevant is found.
5512
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005513
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005514What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005515===========================
5516
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005517*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5518
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005519Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005520----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005521
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005522- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5523 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5524 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5525 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5526 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5527 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5528 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5529 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005530 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005531 repaired.
5532
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005533- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005534 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005535 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5536 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5537 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5538 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5539 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5540 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5541 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5542 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5543
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005544- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5545 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5546 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5547 leading BMO character).
5548
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005549- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5550 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5551 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5552
5553 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5554 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5555 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005556
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005557 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5558 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5559 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5560 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5561 for various simple to use conversions.
5562
5563 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5564 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5565
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005566 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5567 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5568 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5569 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5570 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5571 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5572 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5573 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5574 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5575 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5576 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5577 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5578 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5579 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5580 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005581
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005582- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5583 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5584 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005585 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005586 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005587
5588 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005589 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5590 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5591 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5592 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5593 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005594 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5595 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005596
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005597 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5598 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5599 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005600 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005601
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005602- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5603 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5604 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5605 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5606 floating arithmetic,
5607
5608 x = 9007199254740992.0
5609 print long(x)
5610
5611 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5612 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5613 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5614 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5615 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5616 functions are of good quality).
5617
5618 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5619 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5620 algorithms to break.
5621
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005622- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5623 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5624 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5625 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5626 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5627 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5628 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5629 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5630 order.
5631
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005632- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5633 operation along the most common code paths.
5634
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005635- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5636 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5637
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005638- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5639 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5640 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5641 {}.update(UserDict())
5642
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005643- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5644 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5645 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5646 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5647 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5648 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5649 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5650 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5651
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005652- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005653 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005654
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005655 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005656 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5657 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005658 join() method of strings
5659 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005660 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5661 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005662 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005663 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005664
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005665- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5666 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5667
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005668- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5669 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5670
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005671- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5672 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5673 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5674 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5675
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005676- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5677 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005678 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005679 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5680 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005681
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005682- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5683
5684
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005685Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005686-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005687
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005688- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005689 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005690 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5691 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5692
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005693- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5694 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5695
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005696- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5697 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5698 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5699 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5700
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005701- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5702 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5703 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5704
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005705- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5706
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005707- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5708
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005709- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5710 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5711 that are still imported into string.py).
5712
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005713- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5714
5715- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5716 Now it does.
5717
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005718- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5719
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005720- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5721 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5722 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5723 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5724 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005725 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5726 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005727
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005728- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5729 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5730 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5731 'help(object)'.
5732
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005733Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005734-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005735
5736- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005737 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005738 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5739 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5740
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005741- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005742 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5743 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005744
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005745C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005746-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005747
5748- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5749 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005750
5751----
5752
5753**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**