blob: 955015602ec40aab12d78b868f7aef4a766fcf1b [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000015- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
16 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
17 message in this case.
18
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000019- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
20 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
21 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
22 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
23 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
24
25- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
26
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000027- Speed up some Unicode operations.
28
29- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
30
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000031- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000032 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
33
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000034- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
35
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000036- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
37 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
38
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000039- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
40
41- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
42
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000043- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
44 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
45 was empty.
46
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000047- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
48 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
49
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000050- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000051 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000052
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000053- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
54 codes.
55
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000056- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
57 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
58 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
59
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000060- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
61 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
62
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000063- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000064 (fixes bug #1119418).
65
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000066- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
67
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000068- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
69 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
70
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000071- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
72 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
73 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
74
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000075- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
76
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000077- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
78 reference counts in some error exit cases.
79
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000080- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
81 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
82 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
83 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
84 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
85 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
86 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
87 realloc.
88
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000089- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
90 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
91
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000092- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
93 like their int counterparts.
94
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000095- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
96 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
97 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
98 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
99 for a longer write-up of the problem).
100
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000101- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
102 serializing floats.
103
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000104- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
105 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
106 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
107
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000108- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
109 278.
110
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000111- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
112 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
113 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
114 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000115 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000116 PyNumber_*().
117 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
118
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000119- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
120 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
121 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
122 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
123
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000124- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
125 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
126 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
127 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
128 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
129
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000130- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
131 disabled caused a crash.
132
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000133- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
134 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
135
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000136- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000137 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
138
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000139- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
140
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000141- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000142 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
143 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
144 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000145
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000146- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
147
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000148- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
149 returning None.
150
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000151- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000152 ('\') with a specific error message.
153
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000154- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
155
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000156- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
157 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
158
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000159- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000160 an ferror() call.
161
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000162- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
163 list.sort().
164
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000165- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
166 (2+3) --> (5).
167
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000168- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
169
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000170- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
171 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000172
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000173- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
174 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
175 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
176
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000177- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
178 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
179 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
180
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000181Extension Modules
182-----------------
183
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000184- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
185
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000186- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
187
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000188- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
189
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000190- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
191 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
192
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000193- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
194
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000195- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
196 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
197
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000198- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
199
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000200- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
201 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
202
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000203- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
204 returns in cStringIO.c.
205
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000206- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
207 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
208
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000209- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
210
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000211- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
212
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000213- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
214 the file system encoding.
215
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000216- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
217 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000218
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000219- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
220
221- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000222 line without newlines.
223
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000224- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
225 on Windows.
226
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000227- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000228 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
229
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000230- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
231 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
232 for large or negative values.
233
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000234- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000235 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000236
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000237- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
238
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000239- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
240 if available on the platform.
241
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000242- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
243 available on the platform.
244
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000245- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
246 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
247
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000248- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
249
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000250- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
251 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
252 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
253
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000254- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
255
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000256- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
257 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
258
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000259- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000260 file size.
261
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000262- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
263
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000264- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
265 {remove_history,replace_history}
266
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000267- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
268 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000269
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000270- stat_float_times is now True.
271
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000272- array.array objects are now picklable.
273
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000274- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
275 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
276
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000277- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
278 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
279 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
280
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000281- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
282 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000283
284Library
285-------
286
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000287- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
288 is an error in the format string.
289
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000290- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
291
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000292- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000293 "parent" argument.
294
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000295- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
296 for padding.
297
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000298- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
299 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
300
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000301- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
302 to get the correct encoding.
303
304- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
305 languages.
306
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000307- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
308
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000309- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
310
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000311- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
312
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000313- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
314 functionality.
315
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000316- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
317
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000318- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
319 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
320
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000321- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
322 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
323 match the Content-Length header.
324
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000325- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
326
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000327- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
328 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000329 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000330
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000331- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
332
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000333- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
334
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000335- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
336 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
337
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000338- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
339 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
340 Tkdnd.
341
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000342- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
343 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
344
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000345- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
346 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
347
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000348- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000349 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
350
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000351- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
352 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
353
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000354- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
355 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
356
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000357- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000358 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000359
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000360- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
361
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000362- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
363 error messages.
364
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000365- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
366
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000367- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
368 Bug #1224621.
369
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000370- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
371 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
372 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
373 terminates by raising StopIteration.
374
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000375- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
376
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000377- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
378 component of the path.
379
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000380- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
381 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
382 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
383 class at all.
384
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000385- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
386 files to PyPI.
387
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000388- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
389 them to PyPI.
390
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000391- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
392 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
393 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
394 work as expected.
395
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000396- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
397 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
398
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000399- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000400 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
401
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000402- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
403
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000404- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
405 to build.
406
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000407- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
408 symbolic links on Windows.
409
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000410- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000411 profile.py if available.
412
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000413- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
414
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000415- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
416 in LWPCookieJar.
417
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000418- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
419
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000420- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
421
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000422- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
423
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000424- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
425
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000426- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
427
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000428- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
429
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000430- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
431
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000432- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
433
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000434- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
435 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
436 be exploited in various ways.
437
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000438- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
439
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000440- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
441
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000442- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
443
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000444- Enhancements to the csv module:
445
446 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000447 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000448 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000449 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
450 reporting.
451 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
452 dictates.
453 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000454 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000455 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000456 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
457 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000458 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
459 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000460 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000461 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
462 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
463 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
464 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
465 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
466 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
467 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
468 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
469 without first creating a dialect class.
470 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
471 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
472 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000473 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000474 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
475 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000476 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
477 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
478 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
479 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000480 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
481 This has been fixed.
482
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000483- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
484 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
485 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
486 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
487
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000488- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
489
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000490- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
491 (Bug #951915).
492
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000493- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
494 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
495 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000496 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000497
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000498- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
499
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000500- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
501 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
502
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000503- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
504
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000505- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
506
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000507- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
508
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000509- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
510
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000511- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
512
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000513- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
514 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
515 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
516
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000517- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000518 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000519
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000520- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
521 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
522 tokenizer with very long source lines.
523
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000524- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
525 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
526
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000527- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
528 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000529
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000530- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
531 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
532
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000533- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
534 correctly.
535
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000536- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
537 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
538 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
539 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
540 between two lines.
541
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000542- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
543 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
544 handlers.
545
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000546- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000547 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
548 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000549
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000550- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
551 considering it exactly like a '*'.
552
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000553- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
554 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000555
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000556- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
557
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000558Build
559-----
560
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000561- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
562 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
563
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000564- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
565 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
566
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000567- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
568 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
569 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000570 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000571
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000572- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
573 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
574 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
575
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000576- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
577
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000578- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
579 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
580
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000581- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
582 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
583 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
584 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
585 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
586 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
587 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
588 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
589
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000590- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
591 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
592 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
593 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
594
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000595
596C API
597-----
598
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000599- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
600
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000601- Removed PyRange_New().
602
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000603- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
604 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
605 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
606 mappings.
607
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000608
609Tests
610-----
611
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000612- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000613
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000614
615Documentation
616-------------
617
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000618- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
619
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000620- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
621
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000622- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
623
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000624- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
625
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000626- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
627
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000628- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
629
630- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
631
632- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
633
634- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
635
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000636- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
637 Closes bug #1166582.
638
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000639- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
640 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
641 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
642
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000643Mac
644---
645
646
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000647New platforms
648-------------
649
650- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
651
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000652
653Tools/Demos
654-----------
655
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000656- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
657 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
658 source files that need an encoding declaration.
659 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
660
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000661- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
662
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000663- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000664
665
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000666What's New in Python 2.4 final?
667===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000668
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000669*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000670
671Core and builtins
672-----------------
673
674- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
675 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
676 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
677
678
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000679What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
680==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000681
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000682*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000683
684Core and builtins
685-----------------
686
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000687- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
688 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
689 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
690
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000691
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000692Library
693-------
694
695- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
696 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
697 raised is re-raised.
698
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000699- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
700 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
701
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000702- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
703 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
704 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
705 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
706 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
707 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
708 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
709 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
710 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
711 by the slice are recomputed now.
712
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000713- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000714
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000715Build
716-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000717
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000718- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
719 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
720 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000721
722C API
723-----
724
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000725- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
726
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000727
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000728What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
729================================
730
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000731*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000732
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000733License
734-------
735
736The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
737is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
738changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
739Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
740intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
741durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
742the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
743License::
744
745 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
746
747says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
748to Python 2.1.1.
749
750The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
751License Version 2.
752
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000753Core and builtins
754-----------------
755
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000756- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
757 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
758 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
759 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
760 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
761 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
762 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000763 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000764 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
765 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
766
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000767- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000768
769Extension Modules
770-----------------
771
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000772- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
773 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
774 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
775 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000776
777Library
778-------
779
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000780- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
781 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
782 returned.
783
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000784- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
785
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000786- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
787 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
788
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000789- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
790
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000791- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
792 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000793
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000794- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
795
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000796- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
797
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000798- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000799 the source code is updated and reloaded.
800
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000801Build
802-----
803
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000804- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000805
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000806What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
807================================
808
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000809*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000810
811Core and builtins
812-----------------
813
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000814- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000815 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
816
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000817- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
818 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
819 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
820 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
821
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000822- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
823 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
824
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000825- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
826 constant.
827
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000828- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
829 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
830 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
831 large), and to anomalies such as
832 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
833 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
834 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
835 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000836
837Extension modules
838-----------------
839
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000840- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
841 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000842 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
843 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
844 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000845
846Library
847-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000848
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000849- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000850 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000851 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
852 --swig-cpp.
853
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000854- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
855 it is set.
856
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000857- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000858
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000859- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
860 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
861 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
862 Closes bug #1039270.
863
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000864- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000865
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000866 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000867 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
868 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
869 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
870 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
871 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
872 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
873 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
874 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
875 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
876 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
877 + Updates to documentation.
878
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000879- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
880 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
881 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
882 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
883
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000884- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000885
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000886- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
887 applications should use the getmember function.
888
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000889- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
890
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000891- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
892 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
893 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
894 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
895 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
896 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
897 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
898 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
899 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
900
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000901- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
902 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000903 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000904
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000905- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
906 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
907 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
908 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
909 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
910 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
911 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
912 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000913
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000914- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
915 the new public features (of which there are many).
916
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000917- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000918 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
919 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
920 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
921 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000922 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000923
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000924- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
925
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000926- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
927 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
928 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
929 options.
930
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000931- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
932 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
933 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
934 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
935 conditions under which non-string values work.
936
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000937Build
938-----
939
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000940- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
941 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
942 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
943
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000944- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
945 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
946 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
947 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
948 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000949
950C API
951-----
952
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000953- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
954 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
955
956- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
957
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000958- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
959 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
960 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
961 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
962 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
963 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
964 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
965 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
966 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
967
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000968- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
969
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000970- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
971 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
972 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000973
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000974Tests
975-----
976
977- test__locale ported to unittest
978
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000979Mac
980---
981
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000982- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
983 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
984 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000985
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000986Tools/Demos
987-----------
988
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000989- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
990 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
991 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
992 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
993 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000994
995
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000996What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
997=================================
998
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000999*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001000
1001Core and builtins
1002-----------------
1003
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001004- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001005 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1006
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001007- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1008 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1009 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1010 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1011 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1012 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1013 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1014 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001015 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1016 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1017 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1018 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1019 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001020
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001021- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1022 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1023 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1024 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1025 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1026
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001027- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1028
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001029- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1030 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1031
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001032- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1033 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1034 modified the list.
1035
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001036- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1037 functions is now writable.
1038
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001039- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1040 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1041 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1042 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1043
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001044- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1045 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1046 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1047 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1048 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001049
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001050- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1051 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1052
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001053Extension modules
1054-----------------
1055
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001056- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1057
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001058- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1059 data.
1060
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001061- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1062 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1063 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1064 supposed to have been truncated away.
1065
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001066- Added socket.socketpair().
1067
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001068- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1069 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1070
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001071- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001072 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1073
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001074Library
1075-------
1076
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001077- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001078 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001079
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001080- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1081 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1082
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001083- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1084 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1085
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001086- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1087
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001088- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1089 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001090
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001091- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1092 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1093
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001094- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1095
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001096- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1097
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001098- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1099
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001100- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1101 Percivall.
1102
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001103- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1104 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1105
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001106- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1107 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1108 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001109 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001110
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001111- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1112 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1113 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1114 and exponent.
1115
1116- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1117
1118- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001119 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001120 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1121
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001122- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1123 to the readline module.
1124
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001125- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001126 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1127 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001128
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001129- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1130 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1131 contains symlinks.
1132
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001133- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1134 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1135
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001136- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1137 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1138 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1139
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001140- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1141 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1142 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1143 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1144 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1145 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1146 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1147 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1148 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1149 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1150 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1151 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1152 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1153
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001154- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1155
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001156Tools/Demos
1157-----------
1158
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001159- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1160 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1161
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001162- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1163
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001164Build
1165-----
1166
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001167- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1168 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1169 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1170 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1171 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1172 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1173 plans to do so.
1174
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001175- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1176 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1177
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001178- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1179 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1180
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001181- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1182 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1183
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001184- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1185 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1186
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001187- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1188 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1189
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001190C API
1191-----
1192
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001193..
1194
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001195Documentation
1196-------------
1197
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001198- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1199 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1200
1201- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1202 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1203 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001204
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001205New platforms
1206-------------
1207
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001208- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1209
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001210Tests
1211-----
1212
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001213..
1214
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001215Windows
1216-------
1217
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001218- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1219 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1220 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1221 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1222 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1223 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1224 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1225 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1226 the problem.
1227
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001228Mac
1229---
1230
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001231..
1232
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001233
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001234What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1235=================================
1236
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001237*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001238
1239Core and builtins
1240-----------------
1241
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001242- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1243 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1244 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1245 sensitive code.
1246
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001247- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001248 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001249
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001250 @staticmethod
1251 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001252
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001253 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001254
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001255- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1256 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1257 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1258 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1259 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1260 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1261 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1262 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1263 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1264 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1265 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1266
1267 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1268 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1269 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1270 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1271 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1272 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1273 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1274
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001275- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1276 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1277
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001278- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001279 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001280
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001281- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001282 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001283 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1284
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001285- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001286 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1287 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1288
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001289- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1290 types that support garbage collection.
1291
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001292- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1293
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001294- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1295 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1296 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1297 Jython.
1298
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001299- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1300
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001301- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1302 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1303
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001304- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1305 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1306 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001307
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001308- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1309 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1310 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1311
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001312Extension modules
1313-----------------
1314
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001315- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1316
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001317Library
1318-------
1319
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001320- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1321 TIS-620
1322
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001323- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1324 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1325 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1326 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1327 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1328 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1329 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1330 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1331 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1332 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1333
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001334- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1335
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001336- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1337 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1338 same as when the argument is omitted).
1339 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1340
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001341- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1342
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001343- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1344 schemes are offered.
1345
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001346- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1347
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001348- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1349 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1350 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1351
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001352- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1353
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001354- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1355 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1356
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001357- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1358 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1359 when dummy_threading is being used.
1360
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001361- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1362 from a tarfile.
1363
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001364- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001365 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001366
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001367- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1368 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1369 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1370 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1371
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001372- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1373 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1374
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001375- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1376 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1377 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1378 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1379 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1380 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1381 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1382 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1383 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1384 by some other method in progress).
1385
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001386- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1387 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1388 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001389
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001390- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1391
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001392- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1393 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1394 AM Kuchling.
1395
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001396- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1397 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1398 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1399
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001400- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1401 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1402 instead of unsigned.
1403
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001404- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001405 no longer part of the public API.
1406
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001407- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1408 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1409 string methods of the same name).
1410
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001411- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001412 SF patch 945642.
1413
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001414- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1415
1416 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1417
1418 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1419 DocTestSuites.
1420
1421- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1422 that provide thread-local data.
1423
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001424- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1425 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1426
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001427- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1428
1429- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1430 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1431 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1432
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001433- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1434
1435 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1436 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1437 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001438
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001439 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1440 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1441 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1442 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1443
1444 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1445 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1446
1447 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1448 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1449 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1450 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1451
1452 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1453 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1454 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1455 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1456 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1457
1458 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1459 wrapping help output.
1460
1461 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1462 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1463 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001464
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001465C API
1466-----
1467
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001468- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1469 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1470 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1471 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1472 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1473 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1474 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1475 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1476 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1477 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1478 its visible semantics have not changed.
1479
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001480- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1481 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1482
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001483Documentation
1484-------------
1485
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001486- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001487
1488 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001489 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001490
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001491 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001492
1493 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1494
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001495- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001496
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001497Tests
1498-----
1499
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001500- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001501 platforms that use the Makefile.
1502
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001503- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1504 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1505 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1506
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001507
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001508What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1509=================================
1510
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001511*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001512
1513Core and builtins
1514-----------------
1515
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001516- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1517 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1518 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1519 objects now (one object instead of three).
1520
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001521- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1522 Windows DLLs.
1523
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001524- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1525 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001526
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001527- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1528 a new .pyc magic.
1529
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001530- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1531 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1532 be there.
1533
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001534- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1535 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1536 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1537
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001538- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1539 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1540 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1541
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001542- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1543
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001544- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1545 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1546 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001547
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001548- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1549 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1550
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001551- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1552
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001553- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001554 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001555
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001556- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1557
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001558- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1559
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001560- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1561 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1562
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001563- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1564 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1565 Fixes bug #858016 .
1566
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001567- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1568 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1569 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1570
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001571- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1572 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1573 improves their performance (about 35%).
1574
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001575- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1576 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1577 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1578
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001579- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1580 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1581 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1582 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1583
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001584- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1585 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001586 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001587 length is not known).
1588
1589- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1590 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001591 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1592 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001593 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1594
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001595- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1596 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1597
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001598- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1599 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1600 keyword arguments.
1601
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001602- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1603 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1604 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1605
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001606- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1607 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1608 cases.
1609
1610- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1611 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1612 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1613 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1614 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1615 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1616 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1617 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1618 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1619 a release build.
1620
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001621- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1622 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1623
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001624- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001625 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001626
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001627- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1628 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1629 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1630 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1631 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1632 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1633 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1634 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1635 destroyed.
1636
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001637- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1638 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1639 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1640 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1641 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1642 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1643 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1644 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1645
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001646- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1647 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1648 character other than a space.
1649
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001650- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1651 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1652 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1653 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1654 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1655 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1656 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1657 attributes with the same name.
1658
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001659- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1660 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1661 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1662 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1663 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1664 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1665 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1666 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1667 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1668 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1669 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1670 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1671 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1672 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001673
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001674- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1675 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1676 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1677 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1678 This has been repaired.
1679
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001680- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1681
1682- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1683
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001684- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1685 over a sequence.
1686
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001687- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001688 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001689
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001690- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1691
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001692- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1693 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1694 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1695 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1696 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1697 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1698 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1699 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1700
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001701- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1702 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1703 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1704
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001705- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1706 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1707 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1708 freelist.
1709
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001710- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1711 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1712
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001713- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1714 number.
1715
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001716- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1717 a TypeError exception.
1718
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001719- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1720 820195.
1721
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001722- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1723 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1724 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1725
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001726- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001727 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1728 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001729
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001730- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1731 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1732 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1733
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001734- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1735 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001736 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001737
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001738- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001739 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1740 the first call.
1741
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001742
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001743Extension modules
1744-----------------
1745
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001746- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1747 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1748
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001749- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1750 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1751 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1752 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1753 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1754 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1755 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001756
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001757- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1758
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001759- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1760
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001761- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1762 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1763
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001764- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1765 fewer false positives.
1766
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001767- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1768 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1769
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001770- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001771 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1772
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001773- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001774 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001775 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001776 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1777 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001778
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001779- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1780 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1781 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1782 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1783
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001784- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1785 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1786 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1787 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1788 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1789 #897625.
1790
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001791- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1792 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1793
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001794- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1795 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1796 and pops on either side of the deque.
1797
1798- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1799 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1800
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001801- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1802 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1803 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1804 other functions that expect a function argument.
1805
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001806- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1807
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001808- os.getsid was added.
1809
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001810- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1811 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1812 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1813
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001814- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1815
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001816- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1817
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001818- readline.clear_history was added.
1819
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001820- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1821
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001822- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1823
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001824- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1825
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001826- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1827
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001828- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1829
1830- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1831
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001832- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1833
1834- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1835
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001836- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1837 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1838 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1839
1840- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1841 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1842 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1843 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1844 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1845 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1846 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1847
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001848- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1849 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1850 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1851 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001852
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001853- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001854 iterators from a single iterable.
1855
1856- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1857 of raising a TypeError exception.
1858
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001859- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1860 as parameter.
1861
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001862Library
1863-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001864
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001865- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1866
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001867- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1868 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1869 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001870
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001871- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1872 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1873 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001874
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001875- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001876
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001877- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1878 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001879
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001880- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1881 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1882
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001883- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1884
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001885- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001886 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001887
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001888- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001889 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001890
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001891- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1892
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001893- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1894 on cygwin and mingw32.
1895
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001896- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1897
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001898- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1899 module.
1900
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001901- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1902 installation scheme for all platforms.
1903
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001904- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001905 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001906
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001907- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1908 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1909 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1910
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001911- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1912 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1913 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1914
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001915- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1916
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001917- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1918
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001919- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1920 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1921
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001922- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1923 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1924 type pattern with the same value exists.
1925
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001926- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1927 when run from the command prompt).
1928
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001929- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1930 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1931
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001932- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1933 default sort).
1934
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001935- Added global runctx function to profile module
1936
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001937- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1938
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001939- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1940
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001941- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1942
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001943- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001944 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1945 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1946 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1947 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1948 accordingly.
1949
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001950- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1951 decoding standards.
1952
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001953- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1954 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1955 called for all requests.
1956
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001957- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1958 they are passed to the compiler.
1959
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001960- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1961 indent, width and depth.
1962
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001963- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1964 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1965
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001966- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1967 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1968
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001969- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1970
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001971- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1972
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001973- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1974
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001975- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1976 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1977
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001978- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001979 for better performance.
1980
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001981- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001982
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001983- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1984 a string).
1985
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001986- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1987
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001988- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1989
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001990- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1991
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001992- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1993
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001994- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1995 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1996 list of fieldnames.
1997
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001998- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1999 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2000
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002001- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2002
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002003- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2004 empty lists.
2005
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002006- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2007 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2008 and shelves.
2009
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002010- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2011 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2012
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002013- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002014 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2015 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002016
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002017- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2018 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002019 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002020
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002021- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002022 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2023 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2024
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002025- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2026 and removed in Py2.4.
2027
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002028- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2029
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002030- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2031
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002032Tools/Demos
2033-----------
2034
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002035- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2036 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2037
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002038- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2039
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002040- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2041 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2042 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2043 destination in situations where both files are given.
2044
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002045- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2046 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2047 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2048 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2049
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002050- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2051
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002052- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2053 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2054 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2055 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2056 now.
2057
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002058- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2059 in effect
2060
2061- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2062 C-c C-h
2063
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002064- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2065 -d option was given.
2066
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002067Build
2068-----
2069
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002070- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2071 build under OS X.
2072
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002073- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2074 --enable-profiling.
2075
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002076- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2077 is configured --with-tsc.
2078
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002079- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2080 on AMD64.
2081
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002082- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2083 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2084
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002085- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2086 removed.
2087
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002088- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2089 supported (see PEP 11).
2090
2091- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2092
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002093- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2094
2095- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2096 (see PEP 11).
2097
2098- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2099 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2100
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002101C API
2102-----
2103
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002104- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2105 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2106 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2107
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002108- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2109 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2110 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2111 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2112
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002113- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2114 generator objects.
2115
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002116- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2117 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002118 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2119 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002120
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002121- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2122 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2123
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002124- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2125 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2126 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2127 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2128 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2129
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002130- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2131 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2132 about 10% faster.
2133
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002134- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2135 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2136
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002137- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2138 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2139 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2140 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2141
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002142Windows
2143-------
2144
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002145- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2146 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2147 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2148 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2149
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002150- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2151 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2152 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2153
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002154
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002155What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2156===============================
2157
2158*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2159
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002160IDLE
2161----
2162
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002163- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2164 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2165 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2166 context-menu actions.
2167
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002168- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2169 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2170 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2171 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2172 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2173 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2174 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2175 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2176 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2177
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002178
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002179What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2180=============================================
2181
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002182*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002183
2184Core and builtins
2185-----------------
2186
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002187- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002188 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002189 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2190
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002191Extension modules
2192-----------------
2193
2194- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2195 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2196 than once. This has been fixed.
2197
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002198- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2199 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2200 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2201 call.
2202
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002203- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2204
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002205Library
2206-------
2207
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002208- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2209 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2210
2211- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2212 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2213 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2214 restored.
2215
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002216IDLE
2217----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002218
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002219- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002220
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002221Build
2222-----
2223
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002224- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2225 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2226
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002227C API
2228-----
2229
2230Windows
2231-------
2232
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002233- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2234 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2235
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002236- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2237
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002238Mac
2239---
2240
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002241- Various fixes to pimp.
2242
2243- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2244
2245- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2246 more problems than it solves.
2247
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002248
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002249What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2250=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002251
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002252*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2253
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002254Core and builtins
2255-----------------
2256
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002257- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2258 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2259
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002260- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2261 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002262 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002263
2264- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2265 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2266 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002267 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002268
2269- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2270 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002271
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002272- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2273 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2274 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2275
2276- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002277 770247.
2278
2279- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002280
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002281Extension modules
2282-----------------
2283
2284- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2285 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2286
2287- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2288
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002289- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2290
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002291- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2292 contained within the _strptime module.
2293
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002294- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2295 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2296
2297- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002298 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2299
2300- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2301 the find_class attribute, if present.
2302
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002303- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002304
2305 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2306 (SF bug 763298).
2307
2308 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002309 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2310 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2311 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002312
2313 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2314
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002315Library
2316-------
2317
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002318- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2319
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002320- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2321 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2322 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2323 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2324 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2325 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2326 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2327 or Tester().
2328
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002329- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2330 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2331 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2332 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2333 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2334 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2335 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2336 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2337 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002338
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002339 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002340
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002341- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2342 weren't before was an oversight.
2343
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002344- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2345 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2346
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002347- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2348 when there are no lines.
2349
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002350- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2351 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2352
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002353- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2354 to child processes.
2355
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002356- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2357
2358- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2359
2360- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2361 xmlrpclib.
2362
2363- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2364 responses.
2365
2366- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2367 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2368
2369- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2370 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2371 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2372
2373- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2374 used as patterns.
2375
2376- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2377 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2378 than Tk 8.3.
2379
2380- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2381
2382- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002383
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002384Tools/Demos
2385-----------
2386
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002387- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2388
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002389- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2390
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002391- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002392
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002393Build
2394-----
2395
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002396- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2397
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002398- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2399
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002400- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2401 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002402
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002403- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2404 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2405 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002406
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002407C API
2408-----
2409
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002410- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2411 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2412
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002413Windows
2414-------
2415
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002416- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2417 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2418 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2419 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2420 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2421 Python exception ::
2422
2423 thread.error: can't start new thread
2424
2425 is raised now.
2426
2427- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2428 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2429 instead of from DLL teardown.
2430
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002431Mac
2432---
2433
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002434- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002435 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002436 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2437 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2438 the executable in the bundle.
2439
2440- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002441
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002442- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2443
2444- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2445 on Panther.
2446
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002447What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2448================================
2449
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002450*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002451
2452Core and builtins
2453-----------------
2454
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002455- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2456 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2457 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2458 with the -i option.
2459
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002460- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2461 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2462
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002463- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2464 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2465
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002466- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2467 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2468 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2469 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2470 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2471 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2472 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2473 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2474 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2475 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2476 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2477 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2478 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002479
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002480- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2481 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2482 embedded in a lambda expression.
2483
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002484- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2485 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2486 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2487 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2488 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2489
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002490- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2491 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2492 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2493
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002494- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2495 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2496
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002497- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2498 It's writable again.
2499
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002500- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2501 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2502 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002503 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002504
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002505- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2506 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2507 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2508
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002509Extension modules
2510-----------------
2511
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002512- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2513 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2514
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002515- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2516 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2517 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2518 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2519
2520- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2521 collection.
2522
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002523- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2524 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2525 unique within a single program run.
2526
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002527- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2528 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2529
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002530- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2531 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2532
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002533- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2534 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002535
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002536- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2537
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002538- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2539 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2540
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002541- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2542 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2543 for many BSD-derived systems.
2544
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002545
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002546Library
2547-------
2548
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002549- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2550 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2551 primary ones:
2552
2553 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2554 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2555 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2556
2557 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2558 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2559 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2560 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2561 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2562 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2563
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002564- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2565 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2566 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2567 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2568 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2569 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2570 argument.
2571
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002572- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2573 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2574 in the archive.
2575
2576- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2577 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2578
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002579- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2580 569574).
2581
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002582- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2583 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2584 no more.
2585
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002586- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2587 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2588 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2589 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2590 code coverage.
2591
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002592- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2593 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2594 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002595 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2596 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002597
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002598- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2599 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2600 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002601 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002602
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002603- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2604
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002605- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2606 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2607 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2608 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2609
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002610- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2611 handling.
2612
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002613- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2614 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2615
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002616- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2617 in socket.py.
2618
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002619- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2620
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002621- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2622 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2623 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2624 opener with proxy support.
2625
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002626- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2627
2628- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2629
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002630Tools/Demos
2631-----------
2632
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002633- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2634
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002635- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2636
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002637- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2638 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002639
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002640- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2641 files.
2642
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002643Build
2644-----
2645
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002646- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002647 different root directory.
2648
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002649C API
2650-----
2651
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002652- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2653 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2654 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2655 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2656 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2657 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2658 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2659 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2660 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2661 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2662
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002663- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2664 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2665 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2666 from Python.
2667
2668
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002669New platforms
2670-------------
2671
2672None this time.
2673
2674Tests
2675-----
2676
2677- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2678 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2679
2680Windows
2681-------
2682
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002683- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2684
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002685- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2686 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2687 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2688 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2689 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2690 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2691 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2692 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2693 that's what it's for.
2694
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002695Mac
2696---
2697
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002698- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2699 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2700 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2701 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002702- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2703 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2704- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002705
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002706SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2707------------------------------------
2708
2709430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2710598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2711622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2712661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2713683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2714697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2715713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2716724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2717727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2718729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2719730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2720731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2721732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2722733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2723735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2724740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2725744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2726745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2727747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2728749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2729751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2730753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2731755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2732757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2733760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2734
2735
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002736What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2737================================
2738
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002739*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002740
2741Core and builtins
2742-----------------
2743
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002744- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2745 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2746
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002747- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2748 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2749 and cannot be strings).
2750
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002751- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2752 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2753 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2754 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2755
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002756- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2757 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2758 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2759 Python itself.
2760
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002761- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2762 the referenced object, if it has one.
2763
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002764- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2765 the thread started at
2766 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2767
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002768- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2769 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2770 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2771 placed on a list index.
2772
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002773- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2774 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2775 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2776 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2777
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002778- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2779 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2780 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2781 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2782 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2783 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2784 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2785
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002786- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2787 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2788 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2789 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2790 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2791
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002792- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2793 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002794
2795- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2796 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2797 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2798 #693195.)
2799
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002800- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2801 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002802
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002803- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002804 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002805 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2806 interpreter executions, would fail.
2807
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002808- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002809 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002810 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002811
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002812Extension modules
2813-----------------
2814
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002815- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2816 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2817 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2818 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2819
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002820- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2821 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2822
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002823- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2824 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2825 and Greg Chapman.)
2826
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002827- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2828 recursively.
2829
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002830- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002831 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2832 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2833 leaks.
2834
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002835- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2836
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002837- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2838 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2839 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2840 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2841 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2842 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2843 #705836.
2844
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002845- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002846 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2847
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002848- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2849 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2850 See SF bug #692416.
2851
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002852- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2853 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2854
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002855- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2856 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2857 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002858
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002859- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002860 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2861 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2862
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002863- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2864 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2865 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2866 timeouts to work properly.
2867
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002868Library
2869-------
2870
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002871- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2872 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2873 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2874 future release.
2875
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002876- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2877 for querying platform dependent features.
2878
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002879- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002880
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002881- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2882 pickle protocol versions.
2883
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002884- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2885 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2886 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2887
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002888- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2889
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002890- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2891 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2892 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2893 modules.
2894
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002895- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2896 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2897 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2898
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002899- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2900 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2901
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002902- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2903 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2904 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2905
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002906- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002907 MS Office extensions.
2908
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002909- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2910 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2911
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002912- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2913 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2914
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002915- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2916 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2917 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2918 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2919 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2920 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2921
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002922- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2923 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2924 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002925
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002926- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2927 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2928 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2929
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002930- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2931
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002932- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2933 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2934 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2935
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002936Tools/Demos
2937-----------
2938
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002939- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2940 See the module docstring for details.
2941
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002942Build
2943-----
2944
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002945- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2946 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002947
2948C API
2949-----
2950
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002951- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2952
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002953- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2954 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2955 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2956
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002957- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2958 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002959
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002960 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2961 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2962 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002963
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002964- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002965 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2966
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002967- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2968 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2969 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002970
2971New platforms
2972-------------
2973
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002974None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002975
2976Tests
2977-----
2978
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002979- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2980 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002981
2982Windows
2983-------
2984
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002985- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2986 function.
2987
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002988- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2989 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002990
2991Mac
2992---
2993
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002994- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2995 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002996
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002997- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2998 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002999
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003000- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3001 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3002 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003003
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003004- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003005 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3006 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003007
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003008- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3009 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003010
3011
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003012What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3013=================================
3014
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003015*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003016
3017Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003018-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003019
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003020- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3021 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3022 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3023
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003024- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3025 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3026 (SF patch #664376.)
3027
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003028- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3029 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3030 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3031 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3032 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3033 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003034 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003035
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003036- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3037 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3038 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3039 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003040 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003041
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003042- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3043 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3044 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3045 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3046 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3047 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3048 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3049 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3050 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3051 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3052 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3053
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003054- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3055 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3056 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3057 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3058 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3059 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3060
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003061- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3062 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3063
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003064- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3065 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3066 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3067 case.)
3068
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003069- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3070 passed as unicode strings.
3071
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003072- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3073 See SF bug #683467.
3074
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003075- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3076 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3077
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003078- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3079
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003080- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3081
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003082- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3083 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3084 arguments.
3085
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003086- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3087 See SF bug #667147.
3088
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003089- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003090 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003091 See SF bug #676155.
3092
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003093- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003094 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003095 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3096 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3097 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3098 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3099 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3100 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003101
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003102Extension modules
3103-----------------
3104
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003105- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3106 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3107 tp_as_number pointer.
3108
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003109- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3110 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3111 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3112 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3113 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3114
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003115- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3116
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003117- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3118
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003119- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003120 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003121 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3122 patch #678531.)
3123
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003124- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3125 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3126
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003127- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3128 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3129
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003130- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3131
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003132- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3133 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3134 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3135
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003136- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3137
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003138- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3139 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3140
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003141- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003142
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003143- datetime changes:
3144
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003145 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3146
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003147 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3148 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3149 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3150 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3151 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3152 now.
3153
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003154 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003155 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3156 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003157
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003158 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003159 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003160 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3161 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3162 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3163 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003164
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003165 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3166 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3167 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003168 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3169
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003170 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3171 by a later example coded by Guido.
3172
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003173 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003174 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3175 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3176 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003177 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3178 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3179
3180 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3181 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3182 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3183 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3184 tzinfo subclass instance.
3185
3186 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3187 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3188 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3189 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3190 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3191 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3192 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3193 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003194
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003195 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3196 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3197 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3198 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3199 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003200 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3201
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003202 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003203
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003204 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3205 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3206 as a naive datetime object.
3207
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003208 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3209 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3210 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3211
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003212 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3213 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3214 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3215 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3216 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3217 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3218 comparison.
3219
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003220 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3221 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3222 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3223 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003224 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003225
3226 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003227
3228 and ::
3229
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003230 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3231
3232 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3233 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3234 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3235 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3236
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003237 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3238 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3239 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3240 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3241 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3242
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003243 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3244 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003245 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3246 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003247
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003248Library
3249-------
3250
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003251- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3252 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3253
3254- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3255 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3256 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3257 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3258 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3259 See PEP 307 for details.
3260
3261- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3262 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3263
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003264- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3265 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003266 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003267 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3268 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003269 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003270
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003271- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3272 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3273
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003274- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3275 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3276 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3277
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003278- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3279
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003280- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3281 exception.
3282
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003283- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3284 class.
3285
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003286- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3287 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3288 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3289
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003290- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3291 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3292
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003293- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003294 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3295 See SF bug #659228.
3296
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003297- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3298 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3299 See SF patch #651082.
3300
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003301- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003302
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003303- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3304 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3305
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003306- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003307 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003308
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003309- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3310 DOS paths from other platforms.
3311
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003312Tools/Demos
3313-----------
3314
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003315- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3316 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3317 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3318 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3319 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3320 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3321 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3322 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3323 example:
3324
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003325 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3326 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003327
3328 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3329
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003330
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003331Build
3332-----
3333
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003334- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3335 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3336 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003337 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3338
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003339 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3340
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003341- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3342 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3343 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3344 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3345 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3346 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3347 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3348 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3349 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3350
3351- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3352 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3353 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3354 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3355
3356- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3357 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3358
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003359C API
3360-----
3361
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003362- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3363 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003364
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003365- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3366 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3367 tp_as_number pointer.
3368
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003369- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3370 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3371 (SF #681367)
3372
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003373- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3374 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3375 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3376 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003377
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003378Tests
3379-----
3380
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003381- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003382 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3383 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3384 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3385 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3386 pydoc.)
3387
3388- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3389
3390- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003391
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003392Windows
3393-------
3394
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003395- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3396 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3397 time).
3398
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003399- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3400 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3401
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003402- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3403 release without strong cryptography.
3404
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003405- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003406 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003407
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003408- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3409 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3410
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003411Mac
3412---
3413
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003414- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3415 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003416
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003417- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3418 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3419 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003420
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003421- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3422 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003423
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003424- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3425 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3426 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3427 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003428
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003429- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003430 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3431 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3432 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003433
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003434
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003435What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003436=================================
3437
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003438*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003439
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003440Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003441--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003442
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003443- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3444
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003445- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3446 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003447 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003448 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003449 a different meaning than before.
3450
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003451- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003452 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003453 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003454
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003455- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003456 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003457 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003458
3459- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3460 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3461 and deallocation.
3462
3463- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3464 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3465
3466- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3467 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3468 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3469 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3470 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3471
3472- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3473 now detected by the garbage collector.
3474
3475- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3476 [SF bug 519621]
3477
3478- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3479 identifier.
3480
3481- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3482 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3483 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3484 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3485 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3486 [SF bug 563060]
3487
3488- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3489 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3490 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3491 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3492 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3493
3494- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3495 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3496 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3497
3498- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3499
3500- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3501 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3502 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3503 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3504 state of the slots would be lost.)
3505
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003506Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003507-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003508
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003509- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003510 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3511 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3512 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3513 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003514 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3515 Jython 2.1.
3516
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003517- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003518 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003519 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3520 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3521 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3522 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3523 these, see PEP 302.
3524
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003525- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3526 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3527 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3528
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003529- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3530 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3531 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3532
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003533- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3534 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3535 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3536
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003537- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3538 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3539 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3540 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3541 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3542 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3543 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3544 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3545 releases or implementations.
3546
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003547- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003548 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3549 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003550
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003551- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3552 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3553
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003554- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3555 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3556 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3557
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003558- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3559 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3560
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003561- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3562 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003563 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3564 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003565
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003566- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3567 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3568 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3569 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3570 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3571
3572 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3573 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3574 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3575 pattern.
3576
3577 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3578 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3579 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3580 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3581
3582 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3583 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3584 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3585 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3586 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3587 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3588
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003589- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3590 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3591 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3592 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3593 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3594 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3595 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3596 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003597
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003598- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3599 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3600 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3601 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3602 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003603 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3604 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3605 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3606 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3607 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3608 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3609 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003610
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003611- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3612 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3613
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003614- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3615 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3616 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3617 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3618 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3619 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3620 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3621 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3622 to Zack Weinberg!
3623
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003624- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3625 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3626 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3627 type. This has been fixed now.
3628
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003629- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3630 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3631 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3632
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003633- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3634 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3635 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3636 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3637 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3638 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3639 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3640 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003641 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003642
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003643- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3644 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3645 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003646
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003647- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3648 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3649 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3650 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3651 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3652 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3653 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3654 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003655 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003656 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3657 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3658
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003659- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3660 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3661 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3662 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3663 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3664 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3665 this.)
3666
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003667- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3668 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003669 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003670 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003671 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3672 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003673 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3674 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003675
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003676- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3677 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3678 currently running.
3679
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003680- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3681 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3682 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3683 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3684
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003685- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3686 as directory names.
3687
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003688- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3689 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3690
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003691- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3692 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3693
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003694- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003695 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3696 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003697
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003698- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3699 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3700 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3701 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3702 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3703
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003704- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3705 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3706 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3707 removed.
3708
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003709- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3710 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3711 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3712
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003713- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3714 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3715 to __debug__.
3716
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003717- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3718 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3719 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3720
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003721- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3722 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3723 deprecated now.
3724
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003725- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3726 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3727 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003728
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003729- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3730 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3731 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3732 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3733 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003734
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003735- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3736 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3737
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003738- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3739 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3740 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003741 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003742 is backward compatible.
3743
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003744- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3745 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3746 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3747 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3748 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3749
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003750- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3751 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3752 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3753 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3754 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3755 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003756
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003757- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3758 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3759
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003760- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3761 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3762
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003763- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3764 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3765 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3766 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3767 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3768
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003769- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3770 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3771 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3772
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003773- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003774 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3775
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003776- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3777 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3778 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003779
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003780- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3781 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3782
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003783- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3784 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3785 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3786
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003787- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3788
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003789Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003790-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003791
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003792- Added three operators to the operator module:
3793 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3794 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3795 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3796
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003797- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3798
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003799- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3800 archives.
3801
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003802- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3803 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3804 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3805
3806 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3807
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003808- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3809 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3810 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003811 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003812
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003813- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3814 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3815 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3816 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003817 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3818 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3819 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3820 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003821
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003822- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3823 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003824
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003825- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3826
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003827- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3828 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3829
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003830- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3831 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3832 supported.
3833
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003834- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3835
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003836- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3837 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003838
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003839- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3840 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3841
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003842- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3843
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003844- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3845 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3846
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003847- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3848 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3849 functions but callable type objects.
3850
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003851- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003852 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003853 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003854
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003855- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3856 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003857
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003858- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3859 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003860
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003861- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3862 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3863 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3864 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3865
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003866- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3867 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003868
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003869- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3870 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3871 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3872 and __imul__.
3873
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003874- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003875 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3876 is called.
3877
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003878- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3879 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3880 interpreter was compiled.
3881
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003882- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3883 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3884 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003885 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003886 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3887 1, not 2.
3888
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003889- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3890 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3891 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3892 limit.
3893
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003894- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3895 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3896 bug #623464.
3897
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003898- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3899 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3900 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3901 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3902
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003903Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003904-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003905
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003906- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3907
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003908- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3909 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3910 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3911 with Python 2.3a2.
3912
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003913- os.path exposes getctime.
3914
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003915- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003916 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003917 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003918 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003919 unit tests of floating point results.
3920
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003921- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3922 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3923 has been increased.
3924
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003925- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3926 executed.
3927
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003928- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3929 postinstallation script.
3930
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003931- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3932 test the current module.
3933
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003934- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003935 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3936 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3937 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3938 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3939
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003940- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003941 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003942 Ward's Optik package.
3943
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003944- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3945 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3946 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3947 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3948
3949- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3950 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003951 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003952
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003953- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3954 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3955 shelf are binary pickles.
3956
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003957- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3958 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3959
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003960- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3961 modules are iterators now.
3962
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003963- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3964 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3965 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3966 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3967 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3968 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003969
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003970- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3971 with their entity value.
3972
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003973- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3974
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003975- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3976 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003977
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003978- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3979 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003980 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003981
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003982- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3983 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3984 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3985 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3986 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3987 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3988 main():
3989
3990 import locale
3991 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3992
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003993- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3994 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3995
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003996- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3997 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3998 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3999 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4000 to the new standard.
4001
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004002- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4003 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4004 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4005 an extension to the database.
4006
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004007- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4008 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4009 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4010 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004011 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004012
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004013- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004014 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004015
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004016- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4017 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4018 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4019 bounded integers.
4020
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004021- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4022 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4023 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4024 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4025 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4026 in existence.
4027
4028 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4029 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4030 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4031 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4032 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4033 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4034
4035 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4036 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4037 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4038 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4039
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004040- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4041 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4042 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4043
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004044- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4045
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004046- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4047 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4048 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4049 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4050
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004051- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4052 argument.
4053
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004054- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4055 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4056 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4057 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4058 [SF patch 560794].
4059
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004060- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4061 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4062 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004063 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4064 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4065 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004066
4067- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4068 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004069
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004070- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4071 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4072 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4073 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004074
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004075- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4076 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4077 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4078 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4079 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4080
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004081- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004082
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004083- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4084
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004085- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4086 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4087 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4088 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4089 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4090 identical to None.
4091
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004092- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4093 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4094 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4095 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4096 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4097 results now.
4098
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004099- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4100 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4101
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004102- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4103 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4104 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4105 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4106 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4107 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4108 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4109 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4110
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004111- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4112
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004113- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4114 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4115
4116- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4117 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4118 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4119 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4120 and other systems.
4121
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004122- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4123 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4124 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4125 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 +00004126 work well with these.
4127
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004128- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4129
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004130- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004131 connections.
4132
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004133- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4134 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4135 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4136
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004137- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4138 sets
4139
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004140- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4141 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4142 name.
4143
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004144- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4145 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4146 passed in.
4147
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004148- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004149 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004150 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4151 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004152
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004153- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4154
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004155- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4156
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004157- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4158 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4159 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4160
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004161- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4162 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4163 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4164 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004165 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004166
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004167- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004168 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004169 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004170
4171- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4172 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4173 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4174
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004175- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004176 the value of its expression argument.
4177
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004178- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4179 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4180 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4181
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004182- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4183 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4184 skipstone browser was included.
4185
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004186- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4187 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4188
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004189Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004190-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004191
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004192- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4193 names in addition to accepting file names.
4194
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004195- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4196 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4197 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4198 still used and useful.)
4199
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004200- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4201 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4202 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4203 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004204
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004205- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4206 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4207 the generated binary.
4208
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004209Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004210-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004211
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004212- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4213
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004214- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4215 except in the hands of experts.
4216
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004217- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004218 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4219 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4220 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004221
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004222- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4223 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4224 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4225 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4226 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4227 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4228 builds.
4229
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004230- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4231 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4232 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4233 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4234 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4235 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4236 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4237 new type.
4238
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004239- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004240
4241 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4242 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4243 positive infinities.
4244
4245 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4246 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4247 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4248 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4249 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4250 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4251 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4252
4253 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4254
4255 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4256
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004257- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4258 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4259 size of the executable.
4260
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004261- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4262 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4263 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4264 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004265
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004266- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4267
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004268- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4269 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4270 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004271
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004272- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4273 well as Unix.
4274
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004275- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4276 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4277 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4278 modules in the README file for details.
4279
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004280C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004281-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004282
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004283- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4284 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004285 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004286 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004287 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004288
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004289- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4290 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4291 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4292 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4293 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4294 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004295 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004296 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4297 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4298 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4299 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4300 aligned.)
4301
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004302- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4303 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4304 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4305
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004306- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4307 level.
4308
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004309- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4310 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4311 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4312 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4313 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4314
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004315- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4316 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4317 code.
4318
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004319- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4320 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4321 adjusting for negative indices.
4322
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004323- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4324 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4325 object.
4326
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004327- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4328 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4329 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4330
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004331- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4332 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004333
4334- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4335
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004336- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4337 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4338 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4339 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4340
4341- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4342
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004343- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004344
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004345- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004346 without going through the buffer API.
4347
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004348- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004349
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004350- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4351 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4352 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4353 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4354
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004355- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4356 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4357
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004358- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004359 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4360
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004361New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004362-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004363
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004364- OpenVMS is now supported.
4365
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004366- AtheOS is now supported.
4367
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004368- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4369
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004370- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4371
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004372Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004373-----
4374
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004375- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4376 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4377 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004378
4379Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004380-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004381
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004382- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4383 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4384 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4385 bugs.
4386 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004387 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004388 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4389 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004390 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004391
4392- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004393 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004394
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004395- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4396 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4397
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004398- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4399 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004400 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004401 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4402
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004403- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4404 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4405 use files" uninstall option).
4406
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004407- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4408
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004409- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4410 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4411
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004412- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4413 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4414 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4415
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004416- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4417 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4418 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4419 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4420 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004421 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4422 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4423 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004424
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004425- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004426 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004427 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4428 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4429 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4430 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4431 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4432 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4433 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4434 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4435 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4436 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4437 work around.
4438
4439- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4440 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4441 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4442 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4443 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4444 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4445 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4446 specified with O_CREAT too).
4447
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004448Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004449----
4450
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004451- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004452
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004453- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4454 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4455 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4456
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004457- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4458 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4459 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4460
4461- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4462 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4463 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4464 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4465 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4466 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4467 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4468 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004469
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004470- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4471 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4472 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004473
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004474- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4475 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4476 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4477 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4478 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004479
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004480- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4481 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4482 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004483
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004484- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4485 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004486
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004487- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4488 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4489 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4490 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4491 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004492
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004493- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4494 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4495 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4496
4497- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4498 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4499 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004500
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004501- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4502 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4503 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4504 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004505 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004506
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004507- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4508 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004509
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004510- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4511 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004512
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004513- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004514 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004515 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4516 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004517
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004518
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004519What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004520===============================
4521
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004522*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4523
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004524Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004525--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004526
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004527- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4528 with a custom metaclass.
4529
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004530Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004531-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004532
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004533- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4534 are proxies.
4535
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004536Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004537-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004538
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004539- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4540 very short strings.
4541
4542- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4543 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4544 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4545 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4546 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4547
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004548Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004549-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004550
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004551- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4552 close or delete time).
4553
4554- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4555 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4556
4557- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4558
4559- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004560 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004561
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004562Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004563-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004564
4565Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004566-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004567
4568C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004569-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004570
4571New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004572-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004573
4574Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004575-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004576
4577Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004578-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004579
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004580- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4581
4582- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4583 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4584
4585- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4586 deleted at process exit time.
4587
4588- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4589 in backslash.
4590
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004591Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004592----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004593
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004594- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4595 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4596 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4597
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004598
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004599What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004600===========================
4601
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004602*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4603
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004604Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004605--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004606
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004607- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4608 been extensively updated. See
4609
4610 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4611
4612 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4613
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004614- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4615 deleted!
4616
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004617- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4618 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4619 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4620 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4621 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4622
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004623- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4624
4625 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4626 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4627
4628 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4629 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4630 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4631 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4632 supported anyway.
4633
4634 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4635 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4636
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004637- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4638 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4639 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4640 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4641 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004642
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004643- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4644 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4645 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4646
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004647Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004648-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004649
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004650- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4651 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4652 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4653 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4654 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4655 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004656 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4657 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4658 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4659 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004660
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004661- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4662 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4663 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4664
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004665Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004666-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004667
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004668- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4669
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004670Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004671-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004672
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004673- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4674 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4675 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4676 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4677 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4678 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4679
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004680- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4681
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004682- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4683
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004684- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4685
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004686- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4687 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4688 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4689
4690- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4691
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004692Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004693-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004694
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004695- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4696 off a search on Google.
4697
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004698Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004699-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004700
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004701- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4702 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4703 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4704 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4705 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4706 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4707 other platforms should do likewise.
4708
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004709- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4710 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4711 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4712
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004713C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004714-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004715
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004716- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4717 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4718 producing key-value pairs.
4719
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004720- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004721 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004722 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4723 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4724 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4725 previously went unchallenged.
4726
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004727New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004728-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004729
4730Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004731-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004732
4733Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004734-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004735
4736Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004737----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004738
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004739- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4740 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004741
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004742- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4743 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4744 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4745 home.
4746
4747
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004748What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004749===========================
4750
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004751*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4752
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004753Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004754--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004755
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004756- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4757 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004758
4759 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004760 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004761
4762 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4763 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004764 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004765 This needs to be documented.
4766
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004767- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4768 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4769
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004770- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4771 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4772 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4773
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004774- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4775 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4776
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004777- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4778 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4779 class forbids it).
4780
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004781- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4782 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4783 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4784
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004785- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4786
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004787Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004788-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004789
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004790- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4791 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004792 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004793
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004794- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4795 (like 1 + '').
4796
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004797Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004798-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004799
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004800- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4801 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4802 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4803 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004804 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004805 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4806
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004807- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4808 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4809 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4810 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4811
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004812- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4813 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004814 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4815 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4816 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004817
4818- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4819 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004820
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004821- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4822 bytes on its input.
4823
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004824Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004825-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004826
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004827- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004828 convenience function.
4829
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004830- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4831 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4832 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004833 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4834 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4835 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4836 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4837 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4838 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004839
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004840- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4841 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4842 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4843 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4844
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004845- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4846 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4847 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4848
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004849- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4850 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4851 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4852 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4853
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004854- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4855 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004856 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004857 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4858 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4859 new -l and -e options.
4860
4861- statcache is now deprecated.
4862
4863- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4864 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004865 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004866 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4867 time properly taken into account.
4868
4869- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4870 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4871 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4872 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4873
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004874Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004875-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004876
4877Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004878-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004879
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004880- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4881 is built with libdb3 if available.
4882
4883- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4884
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004885C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004886-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004887
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004888- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4889 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4890 PySequence_Size().
4891
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004892- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4893
4894- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4895 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4896 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4897
4898- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4899 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4900
4901- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4902 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4903
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004904New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004905-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004906
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004907- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4908 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4909
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004910- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4911 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4912
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004913- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4914
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004915Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004916-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004917
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004918- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4919 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4920
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004921Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004922-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004923
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004924Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004925----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004926
4927- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4928 removed completely in the next release.
4929
4930- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4931 OSX.
4932
4933- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4934 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4935
4936- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4937
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004938
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004939What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004940===========================
4941
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004942*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4943
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004944Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004945--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004946
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004947- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004948 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004949 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004950 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4951 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004952 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4953 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004954 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4955 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004956
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004957- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4958 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4959
4960- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4961 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4962
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004963Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004964-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004965
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004966- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4967 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4968 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4969 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4970 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4971 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4972 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4973 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4974
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004975- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4976 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4977 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4978 example).
4979
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004980- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004981 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004982 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004983 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004984
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004985- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4986 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4987 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004988 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004989
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004990- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4991 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4992 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4993 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4994 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4995 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4996
4997 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4998
4999 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5000
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005001Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005002-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005003
5004- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5005
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005006- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5007
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005008- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5009 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005010
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005011- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5012 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5013 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5014 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5015 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5016 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005017 attributes.
5018
5019- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5020 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5021 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005022
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005023- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5024 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5025 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005026
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005027- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5028 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5029 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005030 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5031 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5032
5033- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5034 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005035
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005036Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005037-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005038
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005039- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5040 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5041
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005042- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5043 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5044 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5045 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5046
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005047- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5048 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5049 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5050 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5051
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005052 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5053 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5054 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5055 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5056 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5057 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5058 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5059 without losing information).
5060
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005061- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005062 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5063 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5064 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5065 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5066 module).
5067
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005068 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005069 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5070 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5071 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5072 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005073
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005074- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005075 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5076 encoding.
5077
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005078- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5079 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5080
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005081- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005082 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5083
5084- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5085 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5086 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5087 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5088
5089- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5090
5091- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5092 ON, and OFF.
5093
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005094- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5095 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5096
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005097Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005098-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005099
5100- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5101 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5102 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005103
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005104- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5105 been added: -X and -E.
5106
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005107Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005108-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005109
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005110- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5111 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5112
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005113C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005114-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005115
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005116- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5117 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5118 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5119 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5120 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5121
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005122- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5123 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5124 as long) arguments.
5125
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005126- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5127 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5128 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5129 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5130 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5131 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5132
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005133- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5134 input.
5135
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005136New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005137-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005138
5139Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005140-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005141
5142Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005143-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005144
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005145- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5146 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5147 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5148
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005149- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5150 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5151 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005152 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005153
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005154 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5155 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5156 import signal
5157 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005158
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005159 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005160 while 1:
5161 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005162 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005163 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5164 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5165 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5166 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005167
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005168
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005169What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5170===========================
5171
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005172*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5173
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005174Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005175--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005176
5177- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5178 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5179 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5180
5181- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5182 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5183 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5184 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5185 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5186 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5187 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005188
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005189- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005190 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005191 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5192 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5193 associate a docstring with a property.
5194
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005195- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5196 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5197 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5198 other built-in object types.
5199
5200- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5201 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5202 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5203 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5204 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5205
5206- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5207 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5208
5209- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5210 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005211 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005212 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5213 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5214 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5215 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5216 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5217
5218- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5219 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5220 class.
5221
5222- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5223 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5224 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5225 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5226
5227- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5228 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5229 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5230 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5231
5232- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5233 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5234
5235- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5236 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5237 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5238 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5239 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005240 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005241 with the same value as s.
5242
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005243- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5244
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005245Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005246----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005247
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005248- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5249
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005250- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5251 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5252 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5253 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5254 objects.
5255
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005256- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5257 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005258 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5259 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5260
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005261- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5262 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5263 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5264
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005265Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005266-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005267
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005268- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5269 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5270 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5271 by the instances.
5272
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005273- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5274 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5275 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5276
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005277- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5278 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5279 before the entire comparison is complete.
5280
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005281- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5282 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5283 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5284
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005285- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5286 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5287 getwriter().
5288
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005289- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5290 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5291
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005292- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005293 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5294 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5295
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005296- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5297 iterable object.
5298
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005299- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5300 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005301
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005302- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5303 authentication.
5304
5305- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5306 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005307
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005308- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005309 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5310 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5311 a sample driver.)
5312
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005313Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005314-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005315
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005316- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5317 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5318 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5319 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5320 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5321 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5322 kernel has large file support.
5323
5324- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5325 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5326 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5327 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5328 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5329
5330- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5331 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5332 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5333
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005334C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005335-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005336
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005337- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5338 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5339
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005340New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005341-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005342
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005343- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5344 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5345
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005346Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005347-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005348
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005349- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5350 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5351 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5352 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5353 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5354
5355- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5356 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5357 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5358 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5359
5360- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5361 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5362
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005363Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005364-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005365
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005366- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005367 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5368 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005369
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005370
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005371What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5372===========================
5373
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005374*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5375
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005376Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005377----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005378
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005379- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5380 big to represent as a C double.
5381
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005382- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5383 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5384 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5385 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5386 restriction).
5387
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005388- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5389 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5390 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5391 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5392 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5393
5394 >>> dir([])
5395 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5396 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5397 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5398 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5399 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5400 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5401 'reverse', 'sort']
5402
5403 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5404
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005405- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005406 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5407 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5408 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5409 OverflowError exception.
5410
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005411- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005412 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005413 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5414 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5415 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5416 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5417 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005418 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005419 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5420 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5421
5422 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5423 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5424 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5425 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005426
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005427- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005428 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5429 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5430 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5431 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5432 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5433 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5434 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5435 once it is created.
5436
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005437- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5438 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5439 (key, value) pairs.
5440
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005441- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005442 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5443 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5444
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005445- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5446 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5447 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5448 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5449 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005450
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005451- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005452 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5453 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5454
5455 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5456
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005457- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005458 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5459
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005460Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005461-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005462
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005463- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005464 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5465 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005466
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005467- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5468 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5469 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5470 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5471 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5472 in this area anymore).
5473
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005474- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5475 threading.Timer.
5476
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005477- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5478 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5479
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005480- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005481 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5482
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005483- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005484 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5485 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5486 converted to Python longs.
5487
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005488- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005489 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5490
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005491- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5492 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5493 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5494
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005495Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005496-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005497
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005498- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5499 division operators as per PEP 238.
5500
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005501Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005502-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005503
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005504- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5505 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5506 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5507 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5508
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005509C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005510-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005511
5512- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005513
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005514- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5515 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005516 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005517
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005518 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5519 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005520 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005521 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005522
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005523- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005524 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5525 module:
5526
5527 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005528
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005529 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5530 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005531
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005532 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5533 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005534
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005535 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5536
5537 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5538
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005539- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005540 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5541 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5542 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005543
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005544New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005545-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005546
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005547- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5548 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5549 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5550 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5551 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005552
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005553Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005554-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005555
5556Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005557-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005558
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005559- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5560 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5561 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5562 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005563 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5564 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5565 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5566 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5567 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005568
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005569- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005570 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5571
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005572
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005573What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5574===========================
5575
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005576*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5577
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005578Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005579-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005580
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005581- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5582 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5583
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005584- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5585 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5586 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005587
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005588- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5589 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5590 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5591 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005592
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005593- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5594
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005595- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005596
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005597Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005598-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005599
5600- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005601 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005602 the module docstring for details.
5603
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005604Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005605-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005606
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005607- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005608 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5609 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5610 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005611
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005612- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5613 Nick Mathewson.
5614
5615Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005616----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005617
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005618- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5619 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5620 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5621 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5622 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5623 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5624 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5625 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5626
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005627- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5628 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5629 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5630 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5631
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005632- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5633 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5634 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5635 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5636 come a long way).
5637
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005638- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5639 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5640 write filters for these warnings).
5641
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005642- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5643 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5644 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5645 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5646 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5647
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005648- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5649 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5650 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5651 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5652 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5653 older distribution.
5654
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005655Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005656-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005657
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005658- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5659 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005660 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005661
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005662- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5663 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5664 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5665
5666- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5667
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005668- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5669
5670- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5671
5672- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5673
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005674- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005675
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005676- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5677
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005678New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005679-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005680
5681C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005682-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005683
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005684- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5685 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5686 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5687 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5688 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5689 against buffer overruns.
5690
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005691- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005692 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5693 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005694 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5695 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5696 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5697
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005698- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5699 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5700 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5701 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5702 deprecated.
5703
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005704Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005705-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005706
5707- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5708 relevant is found.
5709
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005710
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005711What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005712===========================
5713
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005714*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5715
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005716Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005717----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005718
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005719- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5720 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5721 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5722 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5723 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5724 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5725 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5726 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005727 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005728 repaired.
5729
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005730- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005731 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005732 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5733 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5734 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5735 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5736 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5737 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5738 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5739 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5740
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005741- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5742 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5743 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5744 leading BMO character).
5745
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005746- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5747 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5748 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5749
5750 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5751 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5752 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005753
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005754 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5755 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5756 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5757 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5758 for various simple to use conversions.
5759
5760 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5761 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5762
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005763 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5764 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5765 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5766 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5767 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5768 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5769 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5770 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5771 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5772 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5773 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5774 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5775 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5776 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5777 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005778
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005779- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5780 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5781 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005782 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005783 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005784
5785 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005786 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5787 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5788 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5789 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5790 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005791 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5792 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005793
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005794 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5795 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5796 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005797 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005798
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005799- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5800 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5801 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5802 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5803 floating arithmetic,
5804
5805 x = 9007199254740992.0
5806 print long(x)
5807
5808 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5809 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5810 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5811 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5812 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5813 functions are of good quality).
5814
5815 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5816 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5817 algorithms to break.
5818
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005819- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5820 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5821 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5822 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5823 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5824 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5825 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5826 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5827 order.
5828
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005829- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5830 operation along the most common code paths.
5831
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005832- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5833 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5834
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005835- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5836 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5837 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5838 {}.update(UserDict())
5839
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005840- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5841 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5842 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5843 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5844 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5845 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5846 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5847 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5848
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005849- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005850 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005851
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005852 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005853 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5854 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005855 join() method of strings
5856 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005857 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5858 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005859 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005860 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005861
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005862- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5863 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5864
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005865- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5866 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5867
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005868- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5869 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5870 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5871 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5872
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005873- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5874 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005875 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005876 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5877 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005878
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005879- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5880
5881
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005882Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005883-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005884
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005885- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005886 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005887 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5888 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5889
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005890- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5891 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5892
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005893- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5894 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5895 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5896 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5897
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005898- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5899 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5900 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5901
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005902- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5903
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005904- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5905
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005906- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5907 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5908 that are still imported into string.py).
5909
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005910- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5911
5912- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5913 Now it does.
5914
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005915- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5916
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005917- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5918 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5919 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5920 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5921 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005922 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5923 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005924
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005925- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5926 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5927 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5928 'help(object)'.
5929
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005930Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005931-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005932
5933- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005934 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005935 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5936 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5937
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005938- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005939 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5940 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005941
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005942C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005943-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005944
5945- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5946 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005947
5948----
5949
5950**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**