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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000015- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
16
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000017- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
18 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
19
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000020- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
21
22- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
23
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000024- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
25 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
26 was empty.
27
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000028- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
29 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
30
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000031- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000032 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000033
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000034- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
35 codes.
36
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000037- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
38 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
39 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
40
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000041- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
42 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
43
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000044- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000045 (fixes bug #1119418).
46
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000047- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
48
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000049- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
50 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
51
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000052- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
53 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
54 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
55
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000056- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
57
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000058- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
59 reference counts in some error exit cases.
60
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000061- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
62 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
63 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
64 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
65 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
66 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
67 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
68 realloc.
69
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000070- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
71 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
72
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000073- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
74 like their int counterparts.
75
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000076- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
77 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
78 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
79 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
80 for a longer write-up of the problem).
81
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000082- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
83 serializing floats.
84
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000085- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
86 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
87 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
88
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000089- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
90 278.
91
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000092- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
93 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
94 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
95 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +000096 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000097 PyNumber_*().
98 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
99
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000100- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
101 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
102 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
103 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
104
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000105- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
106 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
107 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
108 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
109 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
110
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000111- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
112 disabled caused a crash.
113
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000114- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
115 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
116
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000117- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000118 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
119
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000120- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
121
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000122- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000123 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
124 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
125 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000126
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000127- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
128
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000129- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
130 returning None.
131
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000132- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000133 ('\') with a specific error message.
134
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000135- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
136
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000137- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
138 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
139
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000140- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000141 an ferror() call.
142
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000143- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
144 list.sort().
145
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000146- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
147 (2+3) --> (5).
148
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000149- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
150
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000151- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
152 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000153
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000154- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
155 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
156 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
157
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000158- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
159 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
160 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
161
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000162Extension Modules
163-----------------
164
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000165- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
166 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
167
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000168- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
169
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000170- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
171 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
172
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000173- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
174 returns in cStringIO.c.
175
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000176- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
177 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
178
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000179- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
180
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000181- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
182
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000183- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
184 the file system encoding.
185
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000186- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
187 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000188
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000189- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
190
191- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000192 line without newlines.
193
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000194- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
195 on Windows.
196
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000197- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000198 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
199
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000200- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
201 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
202 for large or negative values.
203
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000204- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000205 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000206
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000207- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
208
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000209- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
210 if available on the platform.
211
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000212- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
213 available on the platform.
214
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000215- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
216 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
217
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000218- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
219
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000220- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
221 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
222 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
223
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000224- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
225
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000226- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
227 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
228
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000229- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000230 file size.
231
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000232- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
233
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000234- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
235 {remove_history,replace_history}
236
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000237- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
238 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000239
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000240- stat_float_times is now True.
241
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000242- array.array objects are now picklable.
243
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000244- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
245 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
246
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000247- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
248 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
249 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
250
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000251- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
252 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000253
254Library
255-------
256
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000257- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
258
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000259- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000260 "parent" argument.
261
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000262- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
263 for padding.
264
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000265- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
266 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
267
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000268- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
269 to get the correct encoding.
270
271- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
272 languages.
273
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000274- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
275
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000276- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
277
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000278- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
279
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000280- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
281 functionality.
282
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000283- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
284
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000285- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
286 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
287
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000288- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
289 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
290 match the Content-Length header.
291
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000292- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
293
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000294- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
295 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000296 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000297
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000298- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
299
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000300- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
301
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000302- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
303 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
304
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000305- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
306 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
307 Tkdnd.
308
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000309- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
310 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
311
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000312- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
313 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
314
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000315- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000316 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
317
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000318- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
319 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
320
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000321- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
322 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
323
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000324- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000325 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000326
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000327- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
328
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000329- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
330 error messages.
331
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000332- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
333
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000334- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
335 Bug #1224621.
336
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000337- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
338 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
339 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
340 terminates by raising StopIteration.
341
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000342- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
343
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000344- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
345 component of the path.
346
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000347- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
348 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
349 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
350 class at all.
351
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000352- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
353 files to PyPI.
354
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000355- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
356 them to PyPI.
357
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000358- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
359 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
360 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
361 work as expected.
362
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000363- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
364 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
365
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000366- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000367 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
368
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000369- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
370
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000371- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
372 to build.
373
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000374- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
375 symbolic links on Windows.
376
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000377- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000378 profile.py if available.
379
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000380- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
381
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000382- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
383 in LWPCookieJar.
384
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000385- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
386
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000387- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
388
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000389- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
390
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000391- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
392
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000393- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
394
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000395- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
396
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000397- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
398
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000399- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
400
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000401- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
402 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
403 be exploited in various ways.
404
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000405- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
406
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000407- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
408
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000409- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
410
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000411- Enhancements to the csv module:
412
413 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000414 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000415 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000416 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
417 reporting.
418 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
419 dictates.
420 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000421 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000422 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000423 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
424 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000425 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
426 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000427 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000428 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
429 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
430 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
431 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
432 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
433 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
434 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
435 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
436 without first creating a dialect class.
437 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
438 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
439 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000440 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000441 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
442 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000443 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
444 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
445 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
446 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000447 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
448 This has been fixed.
449
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000450- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
451 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
452 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
453 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
454
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000455- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
456
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000457- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
458 (Bug #951915).
459
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000460- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
461 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
462 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000463 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000464
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000465- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
466
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000467- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
468 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
469
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000470- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
471
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000472- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
473
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000474- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
475
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000476- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
477
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000478- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
479
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000480- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
481 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
482 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
483
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000484- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000485 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000486
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000487- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
488 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
489 tokenizer with very long source lines.
490
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000491- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
492 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
493
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000494- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
495 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000496
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000497- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
498 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
499
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000500- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
501 correctly.
502
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000503- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
504 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
505 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
506 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
507 between two lines.
508
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000509- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
510 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
511 handlers.
512
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000513- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000514 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
515 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000516
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000517- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
518 considering it exactly like a '*'.
519
520
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000521Build
522-----
523
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000524- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
525 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
526
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000527- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
528 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
529
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000530- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
531 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
532 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000533 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000534
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000535- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
536 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
537 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
538
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000539- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
540
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000541- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
542 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
543
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000544- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
545 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
546 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
547 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
548 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
549 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
550 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
551 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
552
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000553- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
554 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
555 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
556 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
557
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000558
559C API
560-----
561
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000562- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
563
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000564- Removed PyRange_New().
565
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000566- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
567 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
568 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
569 mappings.
570
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000571
572Tests
573-----
574
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000575- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000576
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000577
578Documentation
579-------------
580
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000581- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
582
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000583- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
584
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000585- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
586
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000587- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
588
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000589- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
590
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000591- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
592
593- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
594
595- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
596
597- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
598
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000599- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
600 Closes bug #1166582.
601
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000602- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
603 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
604 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
605
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000606Mac
607---
608
609
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000610New platforms
611-------------
612
613- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
614
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000615
616Tools/Demos
617-----------
618
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000619- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
620 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
621 source files that need an encoding declaration.
622 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
623
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000624- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
625
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000626- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000627
628
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000629What's New in Python 2.4 final?
630===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000631
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000632*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000633
634Core and builtins
635-----------------
636
637- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
638 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
639 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
640
641
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000642What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
643==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000644
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000645*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000646
647Core and builtins
648-----------------
649
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000650- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
651 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
652 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
653
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000654
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000655Library
656-------
657
658- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
659 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
660 raised is re-raised.
661
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000662- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
663 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
664
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000665- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
666 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
667 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
668 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
669 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
670 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
671 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
672 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
673 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
674 by the slice are recomputed now.
675
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000676- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000677
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000678Build
679-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000680
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000681- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
682 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
683 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000684
685C API
686-----
687
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000688- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
689
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000690
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000691What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
692================================
693
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000694*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000695
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000696License
697-------
698
699The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
700is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
701changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
702Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
703intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
704durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
705the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
706License::
707
708 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
709
710says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
711to Python 2.1.1.
712
713The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
714License Version 2.
715
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000716Core and builtins
717-----------------
718
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000719- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
720 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
721 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
722 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
723 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
724 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
725 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
726 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
727 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
728 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
729
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000730- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000731
732Extension Modules
733-----------------
734
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000735- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
736 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
737 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
738 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000739
740Library
741-------
742
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000743- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
744 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
745 returned.
746
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000747- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
748
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000749- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
750 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
751
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000752- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
753
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000754- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
755 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000756
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000757- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
758
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000759- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
760
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000761- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000762 the source code is updated and reloaded.
763
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000764Build
765-----
766
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000767- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000768
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000769What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
770================================
771
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000772*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000773
774Core and builtins
775-----------------
776
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000777- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000778 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
779
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000780- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
781 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
782 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
783 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
784
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000785- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
786 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
787
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000788- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
789 constant.
790
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000791- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
792 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
793 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
794 large), and to anomalies such as
795 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
796 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
797 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
798 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000799
800Extension modules
801-----------------
802
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000803- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
804 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000805 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
806 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
807 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000808
809Library
810-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000811
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000812- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000813 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000814 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
815 --swig-cpp.
816
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000817- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
818 it is set.
819
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000820- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000821
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000822- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
823 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
824 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
825 Closes bug #1039270.
826
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000827- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000828
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000829 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000830 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
831 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
832 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
833 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
834 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
835 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
836 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
837 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
838 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
839 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
840 + Updates to documentation.
841
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000842- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
843 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
844 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
845 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
846
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000847- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000848
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000849- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
850 applications should use the getmember function.
851
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000852- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
853
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000854- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
855 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
856 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
857 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
858 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
859 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
860 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
861 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
862 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
863
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000864- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
865 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000866 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000867
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000868- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
869 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
870 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
871 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
872 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
873 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
874 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
875 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000876
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000877- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
878 the new public features (of which there are many).
879
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000880- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000881 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
882 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
883 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
884 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000885 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000886
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000887- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
888
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000889- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
890 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
891 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
892 options.
893
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000894- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
895 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
896 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
897 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
898 conditions under which non-string values work.
899
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000900Build
901-----
902
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000903- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
904 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
905 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
906
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000907- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
908 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
909 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
910 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
911 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000912
913C API
914-----
915
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000916- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
917 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
918
919- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
920
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000921- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
922 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
923 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
924 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
925 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
926 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
927 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
928 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
929 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
930
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000931- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
932
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000933- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
934 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
935 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000936
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000937Tests
938-----
939
940- test__locale ported to unittest
941
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000942Mac
943---
944
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000945- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
946 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
947 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000948
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000949Tools/Demos
950-----------
951
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000952- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
953 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
954 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
955 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
956 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000957
958
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000959What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
960=================================
961
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000962*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000963
964Core and builtins
965-----------------
966
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000967- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000968 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
969
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000970- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
971 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
972 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
973 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
974 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
975 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
976 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
977 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000978 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
979 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
980 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
981 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
982 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000983
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000984- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
985 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
986 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
987 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
988 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
989
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000990- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
991
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000992- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
993 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
994
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000995- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
996 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
997 modified the list.
998
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000999- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1000 functions is now writable.
1001
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001002- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1003 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1004 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1005 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1006
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001007- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1008 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1009 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1010 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1011 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001012
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001013- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1014 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1015
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001016Extension modules
1017-----------------
1018
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001019- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1020
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001021- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1022 data.
1023
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001024- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1025 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1026 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1027 supposed to have been truncated away.
1028
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001029- Added socket.socketpair().
1030
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001031- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1032 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1033
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001034- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001035 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1036
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001037Library
1038-------
1039
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001040- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001041 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001042
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001043- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1044 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1045
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001046- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1047 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1048
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001049- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1050
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001051- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1052 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001053
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001054- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1055 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1056
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001057- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1058
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001059- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1060
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001061- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1062
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001063- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1064 Percivall.
1065
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001066- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1067 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1068
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001069- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1070 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1071 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001072 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001073
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001074- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1075 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1076 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1077 and exponent.
1078
1079- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1080
1081- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001082 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001083 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1084
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001085- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1086 to the readline module.
1087
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001088- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001089 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1090 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001091
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001092- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1093 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1094 contains symlinks.
1095
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001096- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1097 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1098
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001099- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1100 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1101 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1102
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001103- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1104 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1105 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1106 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1107 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1108 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1109 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1110 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1111 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1112 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1113 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1114 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1115 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1116
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001117- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1118
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001119Tools/Demos
1120-----------
1121
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001122- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1123 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1124
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001125- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1126
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001127Build
1128-----
1129
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001130- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1131 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1132 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1133 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1134 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1135 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1136 plans to do so.
1137
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001138- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1139 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1140
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001141- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1142 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1143
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001144- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1145 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1146
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001147- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1148 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1149
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001150- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1151 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1152
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001153C API
1154-----
1155
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001156..
1157
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001158Documentation
1159-------------
1160
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001161- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1162 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1163
1164- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1165 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1166 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001167
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001168New platforms
1169-------------
1170
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001171- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1172
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001173Tests
1174-----
1175
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001176..
1177
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001178Windows
1179-------
1180
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001181- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1182 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1183 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1184 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1185 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1186 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1187 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1188 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1189 the problem.
1190
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001191Mac
1192---
1193
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001194..
1195
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001196
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001197What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1198=================================
1199
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001200*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001201
1202Core and builtins
1203-----------------
1204
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001205- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1206 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1207 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1208 sensitive code.
1209
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001210- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001211 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001212
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001213 @staticmethod
1214 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001215
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001216 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001217
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001218- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1219 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1220 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1221 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1222 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1223 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1224 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1225 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1226 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1227 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1228 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1229
1230 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1231 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1232 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1233 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1234 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1235 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1236 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1237
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001238- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1239 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1240
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001241- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001242 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001243
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001244- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001245 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001246 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1247
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001248- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001249 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1250 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1251
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001252- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1253 types that support garbage collection.
1254
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001255- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1256
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001257- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1258 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1259 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1260 Jython.
1261
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001262- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1263
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001264- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1265 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1266
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001267- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1268 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1269 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001270
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001271- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1272 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1273 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1274
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001275Extension modules
1276-----------------
1277
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001278- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1279
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001280Library
1281-------
1282
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001283- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1284 TIS-620
1285
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001286- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1287 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1288 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1289 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1290 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1291 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1292 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1293 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1294 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1295 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1296
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001297- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1298
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001299- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1300 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1301 same as when the argument is omitted).
1302 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1303
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001304- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1305
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001306- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1307 schemes are offered.
1308
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001309- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1310
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001311- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1312 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1313 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1314
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001315- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1316
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001317- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1318 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1319
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001320- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1321 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1322 when dummy_threading is being used.
1323
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001324- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1325 from a tarfile.
1326
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001327- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001328 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001329
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001330- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1331 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1332 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1333 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1334
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001335- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1336 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1337
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001338- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1339 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1340 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1341 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1342 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1343 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1344 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1345 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1346 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1347 by some other method in progress).
1348
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001349- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1350 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1351 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001352
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001353- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1354
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001355- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1356 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1357 AM Kuchling.
1358
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001359- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1360 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1361 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1362
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001363- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1364 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1365 instead of unsigned.
1366
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001367- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001368 no longer part of the public API.
1369
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001370- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1371 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1372 string methods of the same name).
1373
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001374- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001375 SF patch 945642.
1376
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001377- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1378
1379 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1380
1381 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1382 DocTestSuites.
1383
1384- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1385 that provide thread-local data.
1386
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001387- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1388 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1389
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001390- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1391
1392- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1393 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1394 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1395
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001396- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1397
1398 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1399 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1400 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001401
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001402 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1403 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1404 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1405 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1406
1407 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1408 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1409
1410 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1411 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1412 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1413 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1414
1415 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1416 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1417 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1418 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1419 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1420
1421 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1422 wrapping help output.
1423
1424 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1425 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1426 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001427
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001428C API
1429-----
1430
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001431- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1432 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1433 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1434 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1435 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1436 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1437 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1438 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1439 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1440 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1441 its visible semantics have not changed.
1442
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001443- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1444 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1445
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001446Documentation
1447-------------
1448
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001449- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001450
1451 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001452 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001453
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001454 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001455
1456 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1457
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001458- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001459
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001460Tests
1461-----
1462
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001463- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001464 platforms that use the Makefile.
1465
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001466- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1467 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1468 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1469
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001470
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001471What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1472=================================
1473
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001474*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001475
1476Core and builtins
1477-----------------
1478
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001479- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1480 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1481 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1482 objects now (one object instead of three).
1483
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001484- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1485 Windows DLLs.
1486
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001487- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1488 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001489
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001490- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1491 a new .pyc magic.
1492
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001493- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1494 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1495 be there.
1496
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001497- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1498 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1499 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1500
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001501- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1502 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1503 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1504
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001505- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1506
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001507- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1508 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1509 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001510
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001511- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1512 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1513
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001514- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1515
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001516- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001517 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001518
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001519- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1520
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001521- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1522
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001523- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1524 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1525
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001526- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1527 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1528 Fixes bug #858016 .
1529
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001530- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1531 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1532 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1533
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001534- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1535 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1536 improves their performance (about 35%).
1537
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001538- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1539 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1540 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1541
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001542- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1543 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1544 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1545 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1546
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001547- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1548 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001549 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001550 length is not known).
1551
1552- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1553 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001554 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1555 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001556 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1557
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001558- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1559 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1560
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001561- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1562 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1563 keyword arguments.
1564
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001565- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1566 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1567 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1568
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001569- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1570 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1571 cases.
1572
1573- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1574 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1575 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1576 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1577 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1578 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1579 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1580 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1581 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1582 a release build.
1583
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001584- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1585 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1586
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001587- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001588 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001589
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001590- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1591 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1592 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1593 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1594 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1595 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1596 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1597 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1598 destroyed.
1599
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001600- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1601 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1602 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1603 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1604 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1605 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1606 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1607 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1608
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001609- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1610 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1611 character other than a space.
1612
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001613- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1614 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1615 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1616 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1617 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1618 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1619 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1620 attributes with the same name.
1621
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001622- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1623 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1624 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1625 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1626 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1627 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1628 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1629 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1630 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1631 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1632 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1633 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1634 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1635 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001636
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001637- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1638 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1639 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1640 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1641 This has been repaired.
1642
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001643- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1644
1645- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1646
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001647- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1648 over a sequence.
1649
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001650- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001651 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001652
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001653- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1654
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001655- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1656 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1657 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1658 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1659 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1660 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1661 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1662 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1663
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001664- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1665 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1666 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1667
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001668- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1669 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1670 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1671 freelist.
1672
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001673- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1674 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1675
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001676- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1677 number.
1678
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001679- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1680 a TypeError exception.
1681
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001682- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1683 820195.
1684
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001685- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1686 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1687 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1688
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001689- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001690 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1691 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001692
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001693- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1694 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1695 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1696
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001697- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1698 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001699 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001700
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001701- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001702 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1703 the first call.
1704
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001705
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001706Extension modules
1707-----------------
1708
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001709- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1710 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1711
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001712- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1713 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1714 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1715 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1716 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1717 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1718 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001719
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001720- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1721
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001722- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1723
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001724- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1725 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1726
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001727- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1728 fewer false positives.
1729
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001730- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1731 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1732
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001733- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001734 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1735
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001736- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001737 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001738 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001739 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1740 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001741
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001742- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1743 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1744 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1745 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1746
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001747- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1748 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1749 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1750 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1751 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1752 #897625.
1753
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001754- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1755 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1756
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001757- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1758 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1759 and pops on either side of the deque.
1760
1761- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1762 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1763
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001764- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1765 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1766 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1767 other functions that expect a function argument.
1768
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001769- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1770
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001771- os.getsid was added.
1772
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001773- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1774 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1775 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1776
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001777- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1778
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001779- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1780
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001781- readline.clear_history was added.
1782
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001783- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1784
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001785- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1786
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001787- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1788
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001789- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1790
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001791- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1792
1793- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1794
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001795- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1796
1797- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1798
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001799- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1800 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1801 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1802
1803- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1804 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1805 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1806 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1807 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1808 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1809 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1810
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001811- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1812 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1813 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1814 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001815
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001816- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001817 iterators from a single iterable.
1818
1819- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1820 of raising a TypeError exception.
1821
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001822- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1823 as parameter.
1824
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001825Library
1826-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001827
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001828- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1829
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001830- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1831 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1832 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001833
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001834- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1835 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1836 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001837
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001838- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001839
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001840- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1841 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001842
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001843- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1844 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1845
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001846- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1847
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001848- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001849 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001850
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001851- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001852 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001853
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001854- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1855
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001856- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1857 on cygwin and mingw32.
1858
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001859- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1860
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001861- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1862 module.
1863
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001864- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1865 installation scheme for all platforms.
1866
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001867- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001868 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001869
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001870- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1871 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1872 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1873
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001874- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1875 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1876 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1877
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001878- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1879
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001880- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1881
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001882- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1883 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1884
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001885- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1886 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1887 type pattern with the same value exists.
1888
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001889- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1890 when run from the command prompt).
1891
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001892- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1893 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1894
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001895- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1896 default sort).
1897
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001898- Added global runctx function to profile module
1899
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001900- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1901
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001902- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1903
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001904- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1905
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001906- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001907 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1908 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1909 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1910 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1911 accordingly.
1912
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001913- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1914 decoding standards.
1915
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001916- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1917 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1918 called for all requests.
1919
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001920- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1921 they are passed to the compiler.
1922
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001923- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1924 indent, width and depth.
1925
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001926- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1927 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1928
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001929- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1930 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1931
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001932- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1933
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001934- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1935
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001936- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1937
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001938- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1939 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1940
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001941- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001942 for better performance.
1943
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001944- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001945
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001946- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1947 a string).
1948
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001949- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1950
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001951- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1952
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001953- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1954
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001955- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1956
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001957- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1958 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1959 list of fieldnames.
1960
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001961- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1962 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1963
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001964- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1965
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001966- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1967 empty lists.
1968
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001969- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1970 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1971 and shelves.
1972
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001973- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1974 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1975
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001976- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001977 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1978 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001979
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001980- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1981 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001982 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001983
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001984- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001985 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1986 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1987
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001988- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1989 and removed in Py2.4.
1990
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001991- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1992
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001993- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1994
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001995Tools/Demos
1996-----------
1997
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001998- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1999 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2000
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002001- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2002
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002003- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2004 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2005 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2006 destination in situations where both files are given.
2007
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002008- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2009 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2010 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2011 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2012
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002013- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2014
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002015- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2016 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2017 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2018 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2019 now.
2020
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002021- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2022 in effect
2023
2024- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2025 C-c C-h
2026
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002027- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2028 -d option was given.
2029
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002030Build
2031-----
2032
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002033- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2034 build under OS X.
2035
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002036- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2037 --enable-profiling.
2038
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002039- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2040 is configured --with-tsc.
2041
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002042- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2043 on AMD64.
2044
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002045- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2046 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2047
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002048- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2049 removed.
2050
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002051- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2052 supported (see PEP 11).
2053
2054- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2055
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002056- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2057
2058- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2059 (see PEP 11).
2060
2061- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2062 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2063
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002064C API
2065-----
2066
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002067- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2068 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2069 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2070
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002071- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2072 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2073 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2074 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2075
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002076- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2077 generator objects.
2078
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002079- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2080 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002081 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2082 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002083
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002084- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2085 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2086
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002087- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2088 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2089 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2090 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2091 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2092
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002093- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2094 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2095 about 10% faster.
2096
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002097- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2098 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2099
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002100- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2101 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2102 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2103 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2104
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002105Windows
2106-------
2107
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002108- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2109 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2110 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2111 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2112
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002113- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2114 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2115 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2116
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002117
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002118What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2119===============================
2120
2121*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2122
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002123IDLE
2124----
2125
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002126- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2127 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2128 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2129 context-menu actions.
2130
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002131- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2132 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2133 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2134 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2135 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2136 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2137 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2138 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2139 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2140
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002141
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002142What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2143=============================================
2144
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002145*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002146
2147Core and builtins
2148-----------------
2149
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002150- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002151 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002152 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2153
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002154Extension modules
2155-----------------
2156
2157- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2158 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2159 than once. This has been fixed.
2160
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002161- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2162 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2163 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2164 call.
2165
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002166- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2167
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002168Library
2169-------
2170
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002171- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2172 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2173
2174- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2175 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2176 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2177 restored.
2178
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002179IDLE
2180----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002181
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002182- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002183
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002184Build
2185-----
2186
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002187- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2188 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2189
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002190C API
2191-----
2192
2193Windows
2194-------
2195
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002196- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2197 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2198
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002199- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2200
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002201Mac
2202---
2203
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002204- Various fixes to pimp.
2205
2206- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2207
2208- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2209 more problems than it solves.
2210
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002211
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002212What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2213=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002214
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002215*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2216
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002217Core and builtins
2218-----------------
2219
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002220- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2221 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2222
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002223- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2224 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002225 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002226
2227- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2228 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2229 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002230 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002231
2232- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2233 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002234
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002235- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2236 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2237 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2238
2239- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002240 770247.
2241
2242- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002243
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002244Extension modules
2245-----------------
2246
2247- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2248 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2249
2250- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2251
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002252- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2253
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002254- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2255 contained within the _strptime module.
2256
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002257- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2258 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2259
2260- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002261 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2262
2263- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2264 the find_class attribute, if present.
2265
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002266- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002267
2268 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2269 (SF bug 763298).
2270
2271 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002272 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2273 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2274 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002275
2276 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2277
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002278Library
2279-------
2280
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002281- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2282
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002283- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2284 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2285 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2286 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2287 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2288 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2289 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2290 or Tester().
2291
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002292- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2293 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2294 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2295 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2296 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2297 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2298 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2299 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2300 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002301
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002302 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002303
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002304- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2305 weren't before was an oversight.
2306
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002307- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2308 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2309
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002310- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2311 when there are no lines.
2312
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002313- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2314 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2315
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002316- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2317 to child processes.
2318
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002319- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2320
2321- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2322
2323- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2324 xmlrpclib.
2325
2326- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2327 responses.
2328
2329- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2330 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2331
2332- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2333 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2334 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2335
2336- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2337 used as patterns.
2338
2339- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2340 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2341 than Tk 8.3.
2342
2343- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2344
2345- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002346
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002347Tools/Demos
2348-----------
2349
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002350- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2351
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002352- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2353
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002354- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002355
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002356Build
2357-----
2358
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002359- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2360
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002361- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2362
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002363- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2364 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002365
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002366- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2367 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2368 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002369
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002370C API
2371-----
2372
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002373- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2374 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2375
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002376Windows
2377-------
2378
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002379- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2380 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2381 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2382 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2383 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2384 Python exception ::
2385
2386 thread.error: can't start new thread
2387
2388 is raised now.
2389
2390- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2391 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2392 instead of from DLL teardown.
2393
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002394Mac
2395---
2396
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002397- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002398 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002399 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2400 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2401 the executable in the bundle.
2402
2403- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002404
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002405- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2406
2407- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2408 on Panther.
2409
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002410What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2411================================
2412
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002413*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002414
2415Core and builtins
2416-----------------
2417
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002418- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2419 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2420 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2421 with the -i option.
2422
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002423- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2424 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2425
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002426- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2427 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2428
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002429- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2430 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2431 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2432 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2433 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2434 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2435 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2436 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2437 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2438 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2439 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2440 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2441 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002442
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002443- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2444 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2445 embedded in a lambda expression.
2446
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002447- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2448 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2449 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2450 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2451 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2452
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002453- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2454 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2455 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2456
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002457- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2458 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2459
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002460- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2461 It's writable again.
2462
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002463- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2464 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2465 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002466 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002467
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002468- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2469 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2470 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2471
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002472Extension modules
2473-----------------
2474
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002475- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2476 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2477
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002478- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2479 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2480 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2481 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2482
2483- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2484 collection.
2485
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002486- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2487 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2488 unique within a single program run.
2489
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002490- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2491 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2492
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002493- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2494 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2495
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002496- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2497 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002498
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002499- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2500
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002501- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2502 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2503
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002504- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2505 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2506 for many BSD-derived systems.
2507
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002508
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002509Library
2510-------
2511
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002512- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2513 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2514 primary ones:
2515
2516 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2517 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2518 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2519
2520 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2521 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2522 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2523 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2524 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2525 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2526
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002527- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2528 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2529 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2530 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2531 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2532 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2533 argument.
2534
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002535- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2536 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2537 in the archive.
2538
2539- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2540 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2541
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002542- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2543 569574).
2544
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002545- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2546 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2547 no more.
2548
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002549- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2550 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2551 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2552 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2553 code coverage.
2554
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002555- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2556 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2557 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002558 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2559 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002560
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002561- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2562 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2563 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002564 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002565
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002566- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2567
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002568- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2569 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2570 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2571 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2572
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002573- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2574 handling.
2575
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002576- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2577 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2578
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002579- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2580 in socket.py.
2581
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002582- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2583
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002584- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2585 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2586 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2587 opener with proxy support.
2588
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002589- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2590
2591- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2592
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002593Tools/Demos
2594-----------
2595
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002596- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2597
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002598- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2599
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002600- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2601 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002602
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002603- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2604 files.
2605
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002606Build
2607-----
2608
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002609- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002610 different root directory.
2611
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002612C API
2613-----
2614
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002615- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2616 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2617 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2618 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2619 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2620 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2621 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2622 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2623 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2624 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2625
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002626- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2627 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2628 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2629 from Python.
2630
2631
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002632New platforms
2633-------------
2634
2635None this time.
2636
2637Tests
2638-----
2639
2640- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2641 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2642
2643Windows
2644-------
2645
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002646- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2647
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002648- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2649 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2650 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2651 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2652 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2653 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2654 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2655 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2656 that's what it's for.
2657
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002658Mac
2659---
2660
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002661- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2662 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2663 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2664 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002665- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2666 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2667- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002668
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002669SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2670------------------------------------
2671
2672430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2673598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2674622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2675661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2676683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2677697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2678713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2679724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2680727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2681729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2682730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2683731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2684732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2685733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2686735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2687740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2688744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2689745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2690747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2691749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2692751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2693753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2694755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2695757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2696760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2697
2698
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002699What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2700================================
2701
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002702*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002703
2704Core and builtins
2705-----------------
2706
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002707- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2708 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2709
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002710- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2711 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2712 and cannot be strings).
2713
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002714- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2715 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2716 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2717 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2718
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002719- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2720 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2721 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2722 Python itself.
2723
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002724- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2725 the referenced object, if it has one.
2726
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002727- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2728 the thread started at
2729 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2730
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002731- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2732 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2733 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2734 placed on a list index.
2735
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002736- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2737 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2738 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2739 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2740
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002741- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2742 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2743 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2744 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2745 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2746 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2747 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2748
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002749- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2750 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2751 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2752 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2753 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2754
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002755- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2756 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002757
2758- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2759 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2760 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2761 #693195.)
2762
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002763- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2764 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002765
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002766- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002767 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002768 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2769 interpreter executions, would fail.
2770
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002771- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002772 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002773 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002774
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002775Extension modules
2776-----------------
2777
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002778- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2779 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2780 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2781 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2782
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002783- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2784 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2785
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002786- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2787 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2788 and Greg Chapman.)
2789
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002790- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2791 recursively.
2792
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002793- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002794 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2795 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2796 leaks.
2797
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002798- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2799
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002800- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2801 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2802 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2803 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2804 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2805 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2806 #705836.
2807
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002808- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002809 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2810
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002811- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2812 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2813 See SF bug #692416.
2814
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002815- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2816 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2817
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002818- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2819 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2820 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002821
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002822- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002823 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2824 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2825
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002826- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2827 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2828 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2829 timeouts to work properly.
2830
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002831Library
2832-------
2833
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002834- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2835 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2836 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2837 future release.
2838
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002839- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2840 for querying platform dependent features.
2841
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002842- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002843
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002844- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2845 pickle protocol versions.
2846
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002847- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2848 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2849 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2850
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002851- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2852
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002853- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2854 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2855 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2856 modules.
2857
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002858- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2859 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2860 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2861
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002862- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2863 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2864
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002865- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2866 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2867 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2868
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002869- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002870 MS Office extensions.
2871
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002872- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2873 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2874
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002875- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2876 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2877
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002878- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2879 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2880 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2881 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2882 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2883 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2884
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002885- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2886 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2887 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002888
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002889- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2890 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2891 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2892
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002893- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2894
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002895- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2896 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2897 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2898
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002899Tools/Demos
2900-----------
2901
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002902- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2903 See the module docstring for details.
2904
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002905Build
2906-----
2907
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002908- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2909 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002910
2911C API
2912-----
2913
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002914- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2915
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002916- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2917 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2918 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2919
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002920- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2921 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002922
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002923 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2924 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2925 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002926
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002927- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002928 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2929
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002930- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2931 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2932 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002933
2934New platforms
2935-------------
2936
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002937None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002938
2939Tests
2940-----
2941
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002942- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2943 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002944
2945Windows
2946-------
2947
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002948- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2949 function.
2950
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002951- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2952 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002953
2954Mac
2955---
2956
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002957- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2958 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002959
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002960- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2961 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002962
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002963- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2964 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2965 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002966
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002967- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002968 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2969 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002970
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002971- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2972 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002973
2974
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002975What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2976=================================
2977
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002978*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002979
2980Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002981-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002982
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002983- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2984 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2985 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2986
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002987- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2988 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2989 (SF patch #664376.)
2990
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002991- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2992 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2993 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2994 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2995 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2996 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002997 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002998
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002999- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3000 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3001 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3002 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003003 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003004
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003005- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3006 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3007 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3008 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3009 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3010 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3011 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3012 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3013 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3014 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3015 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3016
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003017- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3018 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3019 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3020 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3021 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3022 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3023
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003024- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3025 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3026
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003027- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3028 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3029 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3030 case.)
3031
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003032- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3033 passed as unicode strings.
3034
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003035- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3036 See SF bug #683467.
3037
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003038- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3039 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3040
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003041- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3042
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003043- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3044
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003045- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3046 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3047 arguments.
3048
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003049- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3050 See SF bug #667147.
3051
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003052- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003053 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003054 See SF bug #676155.
3055
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003056- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003057 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003058 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3059 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3060 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3061 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3062 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3063 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003064
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003065Extension modules
3066-----------------
3067
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003068- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3069 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3070 tp_as_number pointer.
3071
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003072- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3073 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3074 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3075 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3076 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3077
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003078- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3079
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003080- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3081
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003082- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003083 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003084 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3085 patch #678531.)
3086
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003087- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3088 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3089
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003090- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3091 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3092
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003093- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3094
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003095- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3096 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3097 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3098
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003099- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3100
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003101- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3102 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3103
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003104- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003105
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003106- datetime changes:
3107
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003108 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3109
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003110 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3111 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3112 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3113 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3114 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3115 now.
3116
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003117 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003118 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3119 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003120
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003121 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003122 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003123 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3124 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3125 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3126 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003127
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003128 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3129 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3130 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003131 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3132
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003133 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3134 by a later example coded by Guido.
3135
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003136 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003137 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3138 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3139 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003140 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3141 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3142
3143 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3144 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3145 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3146 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3147 tzinfo subclass instance.
3148
3149 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3150 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3151 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3152 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3153 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3154 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3155 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3156 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003157
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003158 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3159 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3160 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3161 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3162 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003163 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3164
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003165 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003166
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003167 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3168 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3169 as a naive datetime object.
3170
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003171 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3172 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3173 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3174
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003175 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3176 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3177 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3178 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3179 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3180 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3181 comparison.
3182
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003183 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3184 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3185 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3186 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003187 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003188
3189 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003190
3191 and ::
3192
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003193 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3194
3195 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3196 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3197 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3198 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3199
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003200 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3201 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3202 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3203 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3204 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3205
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003206 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3207 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003208 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3209 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003210
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003211Library
3212-------
3213
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003214- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3215 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3216
3217- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3218 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3219 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3220 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3221 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3222 See PEP 307 for details.
3223
3224- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3225 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3226
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003227- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3228 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003229 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003230 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3231 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003232 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003233
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003234- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3235 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3236
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003237- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3238 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3239 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3240
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003241- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3242
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003243- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3244 exception.
3245
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003246- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3247 class.
3248
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003249- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3250 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3251 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3252
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003253- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3254 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3255
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003256- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003257 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3258 See SF bug #659228.
3259
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003260- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3261 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3262 See SF patch #651082.
3263
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003264- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003265
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003266- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3267 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3268
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003269- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003270 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003271
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003272- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3273 DOS paths from other platforms.
3274
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003275Tools/Demos
3276-----------
3277
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003278- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3279 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3280 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3281 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3282 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3283 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3284 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3285 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3286 example:
3287
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003288 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3289 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003290
3291 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3292
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003293
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003294Build
3295-----
3296
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003297- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3298 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3299 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003300 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3301
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003302 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3303
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003304- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3305 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3306 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3307 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3308 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3309 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3310 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3311 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3312 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3313
3314- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3315 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3316 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3317 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3318
3319- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3320 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3321
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003322C API
3323-----
3324
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003325- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3326 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003327
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003328- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3329 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3330 tp_as_number pointer.
3331
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003332- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3333 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3334 (SF #681367)
3335
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003336- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3337 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3338 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3339 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003340
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003341Tests
3342-----
3343
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003344- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003345 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3346 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3347 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3348 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3349 pydoc.)
3350
3351- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3352
3353- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003354
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003355Windows
3356-------
3357
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003358- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3359 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3360 time).
3361
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003362- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3363 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3364
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003365- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3366 release without strong cryptography.
3367
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003368- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003369 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003370
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003371- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3372 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3373
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003374Mac
3375---
3376
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003377- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3378 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003379
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003380- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3381 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3382 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003383
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003384- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3385 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003386
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003387- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3388 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3389 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3390 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003391
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003392- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003393 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3394 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3395 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003396
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003397
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003398What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003399=================================
3400
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003401*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003402
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003403Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003404--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003405
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003406- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3407
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003408- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3409 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003410 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003411 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003412 a different meaning than before.
3413
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003414- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003415 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003416 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003417
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003418- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003419 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003420 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003421
3422- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3423 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3424 and deallocation.
3425
3426- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3427 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3428
3429- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3430 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3431 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3432 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3433 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3434
3435- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3436 now detected by the garbage collector.
3437
3438- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3439 [SF bug 519621]
3440
3441- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3442 identifier.
3443
3444- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3445 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3446 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3447 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3448 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3449 [SF bug 563060]
3450
3451- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3452 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3453 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3454 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3455 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3456
3457- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3458 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3459 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3460
3461- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3462
3463- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3464 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3465 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3466 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3467 state of the slots would be lost.)
3468
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003469Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003470-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003471
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003472- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003473 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3474 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3475 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3476 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003477 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3478 Jython 2.1.
3479
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003480- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003481 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003482 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3483 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3484 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3485 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3486 these, see PEP 302.
3487
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003488- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3489 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3490 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3491
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003492- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3493 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3494 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3495
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003496- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3497 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3498 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3499
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003500- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3501 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3502 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3503 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3504 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3505 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3506 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3507 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3508 releases or implementations.
3509
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003510- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003511 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3512 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003513
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003514- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3515 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3516
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003517- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3518 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3519 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3520
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003521- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3522 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3523
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003524- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3525 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003526 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3527 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003528
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003529- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3530 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3531 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3532 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3533 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3534
3535 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3536 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3537 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3538 pattern.
3539
3540 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3541 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3542 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3543 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3544
3545 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3546 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3547 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3548 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3549 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3550 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3551
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003552- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3553 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3554 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3555 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3556 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3557 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3558 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3559 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003560
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003561- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3562 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3563 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3564 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3565 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003566 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3567 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3568 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3569 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3570 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3571 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3572 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003573
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003574- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3575 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3576
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003577- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3578 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3579 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3580 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3581 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3582 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3583 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3584 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3585 to Zack Weinberg!
3586
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003587- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3588 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3589 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3590 type. This has been fixed now.
3591
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003592- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3593 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3594 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3595
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003596- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3597 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3598 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3599 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3600 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3601 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3602 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3603 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003604 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003605
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003606- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3607 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3608 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003609
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003610- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3611 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3612 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3613 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3614 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3615 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3616 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3617 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003618 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003619 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3620 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3621
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003622- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3623 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3624 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3625 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3626 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3627 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3628 this.)
3629
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003630- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3631 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003632 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003633 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003634 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3635 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003636 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3637 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003638
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003639- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3640 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3641 currently running.
3642
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003643- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3644 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3645 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3646 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3647
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003648- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3649 as directory names.
3650
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003651- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3652 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3653
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003654- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3655 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3656
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003657- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003658 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3659 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003660
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003661- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3662 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3663 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3664 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3665 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3666
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003667- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3668 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3669 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3670 removed.
3671
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003672- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3673 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3674 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3675
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003676- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3677 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3678 to __debug__.
3679
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003680- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3681 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3682 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3683
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003684- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3685 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3686 deprecated now.
3687
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003688- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3689 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3690 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003691
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003692- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3693 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3694 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3695 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3696 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003697
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003698- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3699 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3700
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003701- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3702 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3703 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003704 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003705 is backward compatible.
3706
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003707- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3708 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3709 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3710 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3711 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3712
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003713- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3714 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3715 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3716 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3717 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3718 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003719
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003720- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3721 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3722
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003723- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3724 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3725
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003726- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3727 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3728 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3729 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3730 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3731
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003732- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3733 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3734 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3735
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003736- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003737 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3738
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003739- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3740 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3741 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003742
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003743- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3744 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3745
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003746- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3747 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3748 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3749
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003750- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3751
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003752Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003753-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003754
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003755- Added three operators to the operator module:
3756 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3757 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3758 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3759
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003760- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3761
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003762- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3763 archives.
3764
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003765- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3766 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3767 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3768
3769 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3770
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003771- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3772 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3773 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003774 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003775
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003776- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3777 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3778 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3779 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003780 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3781 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3782 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3783 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003784
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003785- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3786 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003787
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003788- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3789
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003790- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3791 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3792
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003793- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3794 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3795 supported.
3796
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003797- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3798
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003799- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3800 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003801
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003802- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3803 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3804
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003805- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3806
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003807- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3808 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3809
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003810- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3811 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3812 functions but callable type objects.
3813
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003814- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003815 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003816 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003817
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003818- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3819 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003820
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003821- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3822 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003823
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003824- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3825 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3826 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3827 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3828
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003829- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3830 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003831
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003832- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3833 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3834 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3835 and __imul__.
3836
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003837- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003838 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3839 is called.
3840
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003841- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3842 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3843 interpreter was compiled.
3844
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003845- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3846 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3847 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003848 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003849 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3850 1, not 2.
3851
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003852- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3853 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3854 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3855 limit.
3856
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003857- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3858 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3859 bug #623464.
3860
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003861- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3862 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3863 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3864 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3865
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003866Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003867-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003868
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003869- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3870
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003871- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3872 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3873 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3874 with Python 2.3a2.
3875
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003876- os.path exposes getctime.
3877
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003878- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003879 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003880 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003881 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003882 unit tests of floating point results.
3883
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003884- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3885 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3886 has been increased.
3887
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003888- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3889 executed.
3890
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003891- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3892 postinstallation script.
3893
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003894- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3895 test the current module.
3896
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003897- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003898 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3899 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3900 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3901 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3902
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003903- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003904 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003905 Ward's Optik package.
3906
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003907- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3908 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3909 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3910 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3911
3912- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3913 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003914 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003915
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003916- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3917 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3918 shelf are binary pickles.
3919
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003920- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3921 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3922
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003923- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3924 modules are iterators now.
3925
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003926- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3927 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3928 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3929 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3930 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3931 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003932
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003933- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3934 with their entity value.
3935
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003936- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3937
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003938- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3939 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003940
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003941- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3942 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003943 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003944
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003945- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3946 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3947 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3948 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3949 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3950 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3951 main():
3952
3953 import locale
3954 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3955
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003956- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3957 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3958
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003959- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3960 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3961 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3962 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3963 to the new standard.
3964
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003965- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3966 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3967 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3968 an extension to the database.
3969
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003970- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3971 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3972 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3973 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003974 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003975
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003976- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003977 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003978
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003979- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3980 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3981 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3982 bounded integers.
3983
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003984- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3985 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3986 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3987 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3988 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3989 in existence.
3990
3991 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3992 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3993 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3994 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3995 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3996 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3997
3998 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3999 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4000 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4001 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4002
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004003- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4004 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4005 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4006
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004007- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4008
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004009- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4010 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4011 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4012 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4013
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004014- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4015 argument.
4016
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004017- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4018 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4019 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4020 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4021 [SF patch 560794].
4022
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004023- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4024 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4025 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004026 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4027 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4028 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004029
4030- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4031 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004032
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004033- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4034 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4035 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4036 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004037
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004038- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4039 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4040 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4041 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4042 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4043
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004044- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004045
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004046- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4047
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004048- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4049 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4050 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4051 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4052 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4053 identical to None.
4054
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004055- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4056 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4057 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4058 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4059 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4060 results now.
4061
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004062- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4063 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4064
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004065- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4066 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4067 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4068 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4069 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4070 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4071 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4072 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4073
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004074- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4075
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004076- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4077 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4078
4079- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4080 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4081 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4082 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4083 and other systems.
4084
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004085- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4086 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4087 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4088 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 +00004089 work well with these.
4090
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004091- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4092
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004093- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004094 connections.
4095
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004096- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4097 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4098 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4099
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004100- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4101 sets
4102
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004103- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4104 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4105 name.
4106
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004107- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4108 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4109 passed in.
4110
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004111- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004112 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004113 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4114 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004115
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004116- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4117
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004118- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4119
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004120- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4121 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4122 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4123
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004124- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4125 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4126 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4127 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004128 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004129
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004130- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004131 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004132 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004133
4134- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4135 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4136 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4137
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004138- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004139 the value of its expression argument.
4140
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004141- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4142 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4143 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4144
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004145- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4146 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4147 skipstone browser was included.
4148
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004149- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4150 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4151
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004152Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004153-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004154
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004155- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4156 names in addition to accepting file names.
4157
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004158- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4159 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4160 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4161 still used and useful.)
4162
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004163- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4164 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4165 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4166 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004167
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004168- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4169 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4170 the generated binary.
4171
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004172Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004173-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004174
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004175- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4176
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004177- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4178 except in the hands of experts.
4179
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004180- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004181 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4182 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4183 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004184
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004185- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4186 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4187 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4188 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4189 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4190 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4191 builds.
4192
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004193- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4194 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4195 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4196 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4197 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4198 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4199 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4200 new type.
4201
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004202- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004203
4204 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4205 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4206 positive infinities.
4207
4208 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4209 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4210 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4211 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4212 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4213 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4214 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4215
4216 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4217
4218 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4219
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004220- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4221 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4222 size of the executable.
4223
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004224- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4225 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4226 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4227 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004228
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004229- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4230
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004231- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4232 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4233 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004234
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004235- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4236 well as Unix.
4237
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004238- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4239 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4240 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4241 modules in the README file for details.
4242
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004243C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004244-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004245
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004246- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4247 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004248 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004249 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004250 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004251
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004252- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4253 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4254 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4255 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4256 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4257 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004258 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004259 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4260 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4261 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4262 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4263 aligned.)
4264
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004265- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4266 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4267 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4268
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004269- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4270 level.
4271
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004272- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4273 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4274 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4275 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4276 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4277
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004278- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4279 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4280 code.
4281
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004282- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4283 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4284 adjusting for negative indices.
4285
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004286- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4287 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4288 object.
4289
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004290- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4291 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4292 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4293
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004294- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4295 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004296
4297- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4298
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004299- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4300 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4301 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4302 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4303
4304- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4305
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004306- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004307
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004308- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004309 without going through the buffer API.
4310
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004311- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004312
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004313- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4314 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4315 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4316 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4317
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004318- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4319 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4320
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004321- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004322 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4323
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004324New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004325-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004326
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004327- OpenVMS is now supported.
4328
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004329- AtheOS is now supported.
4330
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004331- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4332
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004333- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4334
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004335Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004336-----
4337
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004338- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4339 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4340 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004341
4342Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004343-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004344
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004345- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4346 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4347 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4348 bugs.
4349 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004350 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004351 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4352 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004353 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004354
4355- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004356 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004357
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004358- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4359 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4360
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004361- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4362 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004363 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004364 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4365
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004366- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4367 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4368 use files" uninstall option).
4369
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004370- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4371
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004372- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4373 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4374
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004375- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4376 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4377 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4378
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004379- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4380 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4381 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4382 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4383 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004384 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4385 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4386 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004387
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004388- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004389 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004390 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4391 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4392 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4393 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4394 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4395 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4396 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4397 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4398 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4399 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4400 work around.
4401
4402- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4403 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4404 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4405 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4406 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4407 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4408 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4409 specified with O_CREAT too).
4410
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004411Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004412----
4413
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004414- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004415
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004416- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4417 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4418 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4419
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004420- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4421 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4422 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4423
4424- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4425 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4426 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4427 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4428 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4429 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4430 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4431 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004432
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004433- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4434 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4435 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004436
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004437- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4438 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4439 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4440 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4441 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004442
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004443- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4444 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4445 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004446
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004447- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4448 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004449
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004450- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4451 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4452 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4453 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4454 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004455
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004456- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4457 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4458 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4459
4460- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4461 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4462 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004463
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004464- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4465 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4466 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4467 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004468 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004469
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004470- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4471 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004472
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004473- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4474 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004475
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004476- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004477 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004478 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4479 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004480
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004481
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004482What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004483===============================
4484
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004485*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4486
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004487Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004488--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004489
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004490- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4491 with a custom metaclass.
4492
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004493Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004494-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004495
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004496- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4497 are proxies.
4498
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004499Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004500-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004501
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004502- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4503 very short strings.
4504
4505- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4506 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4507 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4508 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4509 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4510
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004511Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004512-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004513
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004514- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4515 close or delete time).
4516
4517- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4518 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4519
4520- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4521
4522- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004523 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004524
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004525Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004526-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004527
4528Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004529-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004530
4531C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004532-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004533
4534New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004535-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004536
4537Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004538-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004539
4540Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004541-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004542
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004543- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4544
4545- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4546 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4547
4548- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4549 deleted at process exit time.
4550
4551- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4552 in backslash.
4553
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004554Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004555----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004556
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004557- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4558 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4559 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4560
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004561
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004562What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004563===========================
4564
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004565*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4566
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004567Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004568--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004569
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004570- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4571 been extensively updated. See
4572
4573 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4574
4575 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4576
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004577- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4578 deleted!
4579
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004580- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4581 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4582 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4583 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4584 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4585
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004586- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4587
4588 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4589 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4590
4591 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4592 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4593 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4594 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4595 supported anyway.
4596
4597 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4598 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4599
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004600- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4601 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4602 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4603 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4604 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004605
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004606- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4607 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4608 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4609
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004610Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004611-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004612
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004613- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4614 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4615 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4616 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4617 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4618 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004619 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4620 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4621 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4622 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004623
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004624- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4625 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4626 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4627
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004628Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004629-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004630
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004631- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4632
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004633Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004634-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004635
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004636- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4637 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4638 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4639 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4640 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4641 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4642
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004643- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4644
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004645- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4646
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004647- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4648
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004649- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4650 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4651 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4652
4653- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4654
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004655Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004656-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004657
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004658- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4659 off a search on Google.
4660
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004661Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004662-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004663
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004664- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4665 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4666 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4667 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4668 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4669 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4670 other platforms should do likewise.
4671
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004672- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4673 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4674 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4675
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004676C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004677-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004678
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004679- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4680 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4681 producing key-value pairs.
4682
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004683- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004684 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004685 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4686 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4687 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4688 previously went unchallenged.
4689
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004690New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004691-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004692
4693Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004694-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004695
4696Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004697-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004698
4699Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004700----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004701
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004702- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4703 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004704
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004705- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4706 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4707 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4708 home.
4709
4710
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004711What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004712===========================
4713
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004714*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4715
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004716Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004717--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004718
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004719- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4720 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004721
4722 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004723 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004724
4725 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4726 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004727 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004728 This needs to be documented.
4729
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004730- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4731 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4732
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004733- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4734 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4735 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4736
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004737- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4738 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4739
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004740- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4741 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4742 class forbids it).
4743
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004744- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4745 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4746 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4747
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004748- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4749
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004750Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004751-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004752
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004753- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4754 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004755 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004756
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004757- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4758 (like 1 + '').
4759
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004760Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004761-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004762
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004763- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4764 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4765 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4766 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004767 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004768 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4769
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004770- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4771 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4772 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4773 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4774
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004775- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4776 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004777 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4778 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4779 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004780
4781- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4782 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004783
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004784- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4785 bytes on its input.
4786
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004787Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004788-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004789
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004790- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004791 convenience function.
4792
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004793- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4794 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4795 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004796 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4797 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4798 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4799 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4800 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4801 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004802
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004803- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4804 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4805 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4806 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4807
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004808- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4809 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4810 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4811
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004812- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4813 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4814 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4815 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4816
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004817- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4818 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004819 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004820 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4821 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4822 new -l and -e options.
4823
4824- statcache is now deprecated.
4825
4826- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4827 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004828 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004829 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4830 time properly taken into account.
4831
4832- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4833 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4834 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4835 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4836
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004837Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004838-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004839
4840Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004841-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004842
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004843- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4844 is built with libdb3 if available.
4845
4846- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4847
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004848C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004849-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004850
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004851- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4852 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4853 PySequence_Size().
4854
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004855- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4856
4857- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4858 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4859 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4860
4861- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4862 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4863
4864- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4865 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4866
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004867New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004868-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004869
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004870- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4871 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4872
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004873- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4874 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4875
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004876- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4877
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004878Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004879-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004880
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004881- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4882 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4883
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004884Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004885-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004886
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004887Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004888----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004889
4890- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4891 removed completely in the next release.
4892
4893- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4894 OSX.
4895
4896- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4897 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4898
4899- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4900
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004901
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004902What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004903===========================
4904
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004905*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4906
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004907Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004908--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004909
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004910- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004911 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004912 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004913 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4914 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004915 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4916 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004917 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4918 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004919
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004920- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4921 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4922
4923- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4924 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4925
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004926Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004927-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004928
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004929- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4930 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4931 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4932 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4933 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4934 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4935 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4936 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4937
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004938- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4939 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4940 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4941 example).
4942
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004943- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004944 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004945 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004946 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004947
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004948- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4949 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4950 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004951 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004952
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004953- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4954 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4955 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4956 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4957 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4958 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4959
4960 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4961
4962 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4963
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004964Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004965-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004966
4967- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4968
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004969- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4970
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004971- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4972 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004973
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004974- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4975 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4976 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4977 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4978 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4979 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004980 attributes.
4981
4982- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4983 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4984 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004985
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004986- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4987 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4988 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004989
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004990- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4991 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4992 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004993 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4994 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4995
4996- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4997 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004998
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004999Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005000-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005001
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005002- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5003 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5004
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005005- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5006 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5007 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5008 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5009
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005010- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5011 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5012 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5013 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5014
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005015 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5016 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5017 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5018 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5019 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5020 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5021 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5022 without losing information).
5023
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005024- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005025 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5026 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5027 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5028 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5029 module).
5030
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005031 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005032 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5033 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5034 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5035 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005036
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005037- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005038 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5039 encoding.
5040
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005041- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5042 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5043
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005044- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005045 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5046
5047- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5048 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5049 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5050 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5051
5052- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5053
5054- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5055 ON, and OFF.
5056
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005057- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5058 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5059
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005060Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005061-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005062
5063- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5064 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5065 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005066
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005067- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5068 been added: -X and -E.
5069
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005070Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005071-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005072
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005073- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5074 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5075
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005076C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005077-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005078
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005079- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5080 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5081 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5082 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5083 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5084
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005085- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5086 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5087 as long) arguments.
5088
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005089- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5090 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5091 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5092 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5093 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5094 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5095
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005096- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5097 input.
5098
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005099New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005100-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005101
5102Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005103-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005104
5105Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005106-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005107
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005108- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5109 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5110 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5111
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005112- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5113 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5114 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005115 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005116
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005117 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5118 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5119 import signal
5120 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005121
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005122 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005123 while 1:
5124 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005125 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005126 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5127 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5128 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5129 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005130
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005131
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005132What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5133===========================
5134
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005135*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5136
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005137Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005138--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005139
5140- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5141 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5142 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5143
5144- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5145 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5146 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5147 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5148 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5149 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5150 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005151
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005152- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005153 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005154 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5155 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5156 associate a docstring with a property.
5157
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005158- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5159 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5160 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5161 other built-in object types.
5162
5163- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5164 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5165 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5166 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5167 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5168
5169- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5170 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5171
5172- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5173 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005174 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005175 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5176 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5177 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5178 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5179 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5180
5181- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5182 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5183 class.
5184
5185- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5186 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5187 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5188 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5189
5190- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5191 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5192 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5193 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5194
5195- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5196 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5197
5198- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5199 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5200 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5201 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5202 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005203 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005204 with the same value as s.
5205
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005206- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5207
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005208Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005209----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005210
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005211- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5212
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005213- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5214 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5215 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5216 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5217 objects.
5218
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005219- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5220 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005221 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5222 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5223
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005224- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5225 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5226 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5227
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005228Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005229-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005230
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005231- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5232 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5233 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5234 by the instances.
5235
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005236- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5237 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5238 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5239
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005240- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5241 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5242 before the entire comparison is complete.
5243
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005244- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5245 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5246 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5247
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005248- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5249 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5250 getwriter().
5251
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005252- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5253 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5254
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005255- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005256 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5257 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5258
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005259- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5260 iterable object.
5261
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005262- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5263 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005264
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005265- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5266 authentication.
5267
5268- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5269 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005270
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005271- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005272 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5273 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5274 a sample driver.)
5275
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005276Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005277-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005278
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005279- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5280 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5281 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5282 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5283 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5284 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5285 kernel has large file support.
5286
5287- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5288 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5289 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5290 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5291 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5292
5293- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5294 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5295 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5296
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005297C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005298-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005299
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005300- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5301 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5302
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005303New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005304-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005305
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005306- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5307 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5308
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005309Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005310-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005311
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005312- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5313 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5314 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5315 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5316 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5317
5318- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5319 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5320 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5321 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5322
5323- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5324 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5325
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005326Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005327-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005328
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005329- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005330 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5331 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005332
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005333
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005334What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5335===========================
5336
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005337*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5338
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005339Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005340----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005341
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005342- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5343 big to represent as a C double.
5344
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005345- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5346 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5347 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5348 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5349 restriction).
5350
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005351- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5352 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5353 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5354 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5355 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5356
5357 >>> dir([])
5358 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5359 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5360 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5361 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5362 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5363 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5364 'reverse', 'sort']
5365
5366 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5367
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005368- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005369 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5370 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5371 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5372 OverflowError exception.
5373
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005374- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005375 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005376 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5377 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5378 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5379 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5380 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005381 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005382 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5383 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5384
5385 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5386 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5387 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5388 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005389
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005390- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005391 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5392 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5393 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5394 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5395 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5396 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5397 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5398 once it is created.
5399
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005400- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5401 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5402 (key, value) pairs.
5403
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005404- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005405 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5406 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5407
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005408- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5409 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5410 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5411 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5412 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005413
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005414- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005415 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5416 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5417
5418 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5419
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005420- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005421 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5422
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005423Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005424-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005425
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005426- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005427 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5428 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005429
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005430- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5431 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5432 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5433 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5434 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5435 in this area anymore).
5436
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005437- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5438 threading.Timer.
5439
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005440- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5441 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5442
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005443- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005444 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5445
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005446- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005447 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5448 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5449 converted to Python longs.
5450
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005451- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005452 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5453
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005454- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5455 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5456 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5457
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005458Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005459-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005460
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005461- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5462 division operators as per PEP 238.
5463
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005464Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005465-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005466
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005467- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5468 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5469 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5470 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5471
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005472C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005473-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005474
5475- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005476
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005477- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5478 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005479 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005480
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005481 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5482 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005483 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005484 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005485
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005486- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005487 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5488 module:
5489
5490 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005491
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005492 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5493 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005494
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005495 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5496 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005497
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005498 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5499
5500 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5501
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005502- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005503 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5504 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5505 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005506
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005507New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005508-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005509
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005510- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5511 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5512 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5513 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5514 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005515
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005516Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005517-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005518
5519Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005520-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005521
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005522- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5523 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5524 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5525 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005526 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5527 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5528 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5529 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5530 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005531
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005532- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005533 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5534
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005535
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005536What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5537===========================
5538
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005539*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5540
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005541Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005542-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005543
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005544- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5545 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5546
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005547- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5548 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5549 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005550
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005551- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5552 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5553 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5554 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005555
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005556- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5557
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005558- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005559
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005560Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005561-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005562
5563- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005564 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005565 the module docstring for details.
5566
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005567Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005568-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005569
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005570- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005571 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5572 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5573 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005574
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005575- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5576 Nick Mathewson.
5577
5578Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005579----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005580
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005581- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5582 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5583 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5584 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5585 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5586 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5587 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5588 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5589
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005590- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5591 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5592 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5593 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5594
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005595- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5596 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5597 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5598 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5599 come a long way).
5600
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005601- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5602 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5603 write filters for these warnings).
5604
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005605- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5606 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5607 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5608 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5609 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5610
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005611- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5612 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5613 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5614 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5615 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5616 older distribution.
5617
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005618Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005619-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005620
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005621- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5622 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005623 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005624
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005625- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5626 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5627 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5628
5629- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5630
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005631- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5632
5633- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5634
5635- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5636
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005637- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005638
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005639- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5640
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005641New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005642-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005643
5644C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005645-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005646
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005647- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5648 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5649 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5650 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5651 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5652 against buffer overruns.
5653
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005654- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005655 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5656 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005657 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5658 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5659 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5660
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005661- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5662 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5663 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5664 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5665 deprecated.
5666
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005667Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005668-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005669
5670- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5671 relevant is found.
5672
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005673
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005674What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005675===========================
5676
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005677*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5678
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005679Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005680----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005681
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005682- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5683 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5684 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5685 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5686 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5687 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5688 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5689 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005690 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005691 repaired.
5692
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005693- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005694 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005695 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5696 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5697 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5698 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5699 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5700 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5701 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5702 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5703
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005704- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5705 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5706 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5707 leading BMO character).
5708
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005709- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5710 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5711 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5712
5713 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5714 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5715 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005716
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005717 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5718 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5719 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5720 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5721 for various simple to use conversions.
5722
5723 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5724 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5725
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005726 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5727 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5728 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5729 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5730 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5731 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5732 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5733 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5734 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5735 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5736 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5737 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5738 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5739 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5740 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005741
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005742- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5743 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5744 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005745 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005746 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005747
5748 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005749 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5750 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5751 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5752 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5753 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005754 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5755 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005756
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005757 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5758 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5759 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005760 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005761
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005762- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5763 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5764 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5765 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5766 floating arithmetic,
5767
5768 x = 9007199254740992.0
5769 print long(x)
5770
5771 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5772 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5773 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5774 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5775 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5776 functions are of good quality).
5777
5778 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5779 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5780 algorithms to break.
5781
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005782- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5783 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5784 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5785 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5786 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5787 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5788 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5789 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5790 order.
5791
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005792- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5793 operation along the most common code paths.
5794
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005795- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5796 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5797
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005798- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5799 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5800 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5801 {}.update(UserDict())
5802
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005803- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5804 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5805 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5806 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5807 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5808 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5809 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5810 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5811
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005812- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005813 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005814
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005815 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005816 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5817 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005818 join() method of strings
5819 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005820 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5821 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005822 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005823 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005824
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005825- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5826 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5827
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005828- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5829 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5830
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005831- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5832 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5833 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5834 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5835
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005836- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5837 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005838 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005839 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5840 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005841
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005842- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5843
5844
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005845Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005846-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005847
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005848- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005849 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005850 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5851 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5852
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005853- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5854 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5855
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005856- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5857 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5858 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5859 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5860
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005861- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5862 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5863 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5864
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005865- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5866
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005867- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5868
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005869- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5870 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5871 that are still imported into string.py).
5872
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005873- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5874
5875- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5876 Now it does.
5877
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005878- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5879
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005880- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5881 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5882 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5883 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5884 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005885 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5886 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005887
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005888- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5889 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5890 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5891 'help(object)'.
5892
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005893Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005894-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005895
5896- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005897 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005898 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5899 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5900
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005901- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005902 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5903 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005904
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005905C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005906-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005907
5908- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5909 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005910
5911----
5912
5913**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**