blob: 1662110012f617c9548ae298c2a180c7c499fb81 [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 Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000015- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
16 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
17 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
18
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000019- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
20 configure would break checking curses.h.
21
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000022- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
23 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
24
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000025- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
26
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000027- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
28
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000029- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
30
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000031- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
32 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
33
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000034- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
35 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
36 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
37
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000038- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
39 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000040 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000041
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000042- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
43 now encodes backslash correctly.
44
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000045- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
46
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000047- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
48 and long longs.
49
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000050- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
51 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
52 message in this case.
53
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000054- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
55 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
56 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
57 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
58 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
59
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000060- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000061
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000062- Speed up some Unicode operations.
63
64- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
65
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000066- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000067 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
68
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000069- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
70
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000071- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
72 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
73
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000074- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
75
76- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
77
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000078- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
79 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
80 was empty.
81
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000082- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
83 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
84
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000085- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000086 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000087
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000088- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
89 codes.
90
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000091- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
92 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
93 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
94
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000095- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
96 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
97
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000098- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000099 (fixes bug #1119418).
100
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000101- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
102
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000103- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
104 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
105
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000106- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
107 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
108 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
109
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000110- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
111
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000112- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
113 reference counts in some error exit cases.
114
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000115- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
116 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
117 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
118 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
119 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
120 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
121 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
122 realloc.
123
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000124- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
125 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
126
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000127- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
128 like their int counterparts.
129
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000130- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
131 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
132 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
133 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
134 for a longer write-up of the problem).
135
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000136- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
137 serializing floats.
138
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000139- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
140 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
141 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
142
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000143- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
144 278.
145
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000146- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
147 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
148 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
149 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000150 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000151 PyNumber_*().
152 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
153
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000154- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
155 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
156 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
157 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
158
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000159- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
160 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
161 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
162 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
163 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
164
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000165- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
166 disabled caused a crash.
167
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000168- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
169 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
170
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000171- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000172 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
173
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000174- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
175
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000176- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000177 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
178 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
179 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000180
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000181- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
182
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000183- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
184 returning None.
185
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000186- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000187 ('\') with a specific error message.
188
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000189- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
190
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000191- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
192 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
193
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000194- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000195 an ferror() call.
196
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000197- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
198 list.sort().
199
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000200- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
201 (2+3) --> (5).
202
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000203- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
204
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000205- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
206 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000207
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000208- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
209 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
210 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
211
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000212- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
213 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
214 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
215
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000216Extension Modules
217-----------------
218
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000219- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
220
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000221- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
222
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000223- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
224 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
225 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
226
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000227- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
228 without prior setting of the userptr.
229
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000230- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
231
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000232- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
233
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000234- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
235 problem on AIX.
236
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000237- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
238
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000239- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
240
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000241- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
242
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000243- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
244 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
245
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000246- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
247
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000248- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
249 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
250
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000251- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
252
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000253- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
254 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
255
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000256- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
257 returns in cStringIO.c.
258
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000259- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
260 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
261
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000262- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
263
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000264- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
265
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000266- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
267 the file system encoding.
268
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000269- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
270 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000271
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000272- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
273
274- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000275 line without newlines.
276
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000277- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
278 on Windows.
279
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000280- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000281 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
282
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000283- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
284 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
285 for large or negative values.
286
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000287- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000288 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000289
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000290- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
291
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000292- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
293 if available on the platform.
294
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000295- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
296 available on the platform.
297
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000298- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
299 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
300
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000301- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
302
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000303- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
304 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
305 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
306
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000307- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
308
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000309- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
310 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
311
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000312- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000313 file size.
314
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000315- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
316
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000317- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
318 {remove_history,replace_history}
319
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000320- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
321 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000322
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000323- stat_float_times is now True.
324
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000325- array.array objects are now picklable.
326
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000327- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
328 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
329
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000330- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
331 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
332 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
333
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000334- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
335 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000336
337Library
338-------
339
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000340- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
341
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000342- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000343 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000344
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000345- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
346 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000347
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000348- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
349
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000350- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
351
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000352- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
353 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
354 LoadError subclasses IOError.
355
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000356- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000357 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
358 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
359 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
360 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
361
362 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
363 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
364 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
365 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
366 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000367
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000368- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
369 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
370 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
371
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000372- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
373
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000374- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
375
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000376- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
377 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
378 illegal argument)
379
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000380- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
381 is an error in the format string.
382
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000383- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
384
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000385- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000386 "parent" argument.
387
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000388- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
389 for padding.
390
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000391- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
392 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
393
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000394- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
395 to get the correct encoding.
396
397- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
398 languages.
399
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000400- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
401
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000402- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
403
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000404- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
405
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000406- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
407 functionality.
408
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000409- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
410
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000411- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
412 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
413
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000414- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
415 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
416 match the Content-Length header.
417
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000418- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
419
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000420- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
421 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000422 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000423
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000424- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
425
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000426- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
427
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000428- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
429 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
430
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000431- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
432 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
433 Tkdnd.
434
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000435- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
436 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
437
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000438- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
439 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
440
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000441- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000442 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
443
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000444- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
445 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
446
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000447- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
448 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
449
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000450- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000451 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000452
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000453- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
454
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000455- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
456 error messages.
457
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000458- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
459
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000460- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
461 Bug #1224621.
462
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000463- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
464 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
465 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
466 terminates by raising StopIteration.
467
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000468- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
469
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000470- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
471 component of the path.
472
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000473- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
474 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
475 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
476 class at all.
477
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000478- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
479 files to PyPI.
480
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000481- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
482 them to PyPI.
483
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000484- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
485 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
486 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
487 work as expected.
488
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000489- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
490 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
491
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000492- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000493 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
494
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000495- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
496
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000497- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
498 to build.
499
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000500- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
501 symbolic links on Windows.
502
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000503- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000504 profile.py if available.
505
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000506- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
507
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000508- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
509 in LWPCookieJar.
510
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000511- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
512
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000513- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
514
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000515- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
516
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000517- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
518
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000519- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
520
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000521- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
522
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000523- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
524
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000525- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
526
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000527- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
528 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
529 be exploited in various ways.
530
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000531- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000532 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
533
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000534- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
535 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
536
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000537- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000538 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
539
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000540- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
541
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000542- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
543
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000544- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
545
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000546- Enhancements to the csv module:
547
548 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000549 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000550 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000551 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
552 reporting.
553 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
554 dictates.
555 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000556 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000557 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000558 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
559 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000560 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
561 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000562 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000563 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
564 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
565 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
566 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
567 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
568 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
569 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
570 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
571 without first creating a dialect class.
572 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
573 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
574 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000575 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000576 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
577 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000578 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
579 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
580 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
581 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000582 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
583 This has been fixed.
584
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000585- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
586 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
587 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
588 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
589
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000590- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
591
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000592- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
593 (Bug #951915).
594
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000595- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
596 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
597 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000598 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000599
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000600- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
601
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000602- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
603 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
604
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000605- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
606
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000607- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
608
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000609- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
610
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000611- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
612
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000613- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
614
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000615- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
616 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
617 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
618
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000619- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000620 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000621
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000622- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
623 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
624 tokenizer with very long source lines.
625
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000626- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
627 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
628 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000629
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000630- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
631 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000632
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000633- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
634 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
635
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000636- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
637 correctly.
638
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000639- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
640 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
641 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
642 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
643 between two lines.
644
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000645- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
646 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
647 handlers.
648
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000649- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000650 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
651 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000652
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000653- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
654 considering it exactly like a '*'.
655
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000656- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
657 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000658
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000659- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
660
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000661Build
662-----
663
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000664- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
665
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000666- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
667 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
668
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000669- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
670
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000671- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
672 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
673
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000674- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
675 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
676
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000677- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
678 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
679 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000680 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000681
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000682- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
683 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
684 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
685
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000686- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
687
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000688- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
689 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
690
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000691- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
692 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
693 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
694 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
695 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
696 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
697 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
698 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
699
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000700- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
701 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
702 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
703 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
704
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000705C API
706-----
707
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000708- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
709
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000710- Removed PyRange_New().
711
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000712- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
713 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
714 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
715 mappings.
716
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000717
718Tests
719-----
720
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000721- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000722
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000723- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
724 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
725
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000726
727Documentation
728-------------
729
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000730- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
731 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
732
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000733- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
734
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000735- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
736
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000737- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
738
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000739- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
740
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000741- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
742
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000743- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
744
745- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
746
747- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
748
749- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
750
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000751- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
752 Closes bug #1166582.
753
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000754- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
755 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
756 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
757
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000758Mac
759---
760
761
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000762New platforms
763-------------
764
765- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
766
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000767
768Tools/Demos
769-----------
770
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000771- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
772 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
773 source files that need an encoding declaration.
774 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
775
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000776- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
777
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000778- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000779
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000780- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
781 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000782
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000783What's New in Python 2.4 final?
784===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000785
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000786*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000787
788Core and builtins
789-----------------
790
791- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
792 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
793 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
794
795
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000796What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
797==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000798
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000799*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000800
801Core and builtins
802-----------------
803
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000804- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
805 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
806 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
807
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000808
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000809Library
810-------
811
812- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
813 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
814 raised is re-raised.
815
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000816- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
817 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
818
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000819- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
820 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
821 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
822 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
823 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
824 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
825 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
826 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
827 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
828 by the slice are recomputed now.
829
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000830- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000831
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000832Build
833-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000834
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000835- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
836 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
837 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000838
839C API
840-----
841
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000842- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
843
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000844
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000845What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
846================================
847
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000848*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000849
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000850License
851-------
852
853The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
854is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
855changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
856Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
857intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
858durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
859the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
860License::
861
862 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
863
864says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
865to Python 2.1.1.
866
867The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
868License Version 2.
869
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000870Core and builtins
871-----------------
872
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000873- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
874 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
875 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
876 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
877 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
878 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
879 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000880 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000881 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
882 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
883
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000884- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000885
886Extension Modules
887-----------------
888
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000889- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
890 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
891 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
892 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000893
894Library
895-------
896
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000897- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
898 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
899 returned.
900
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000901- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
902
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000903- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
904 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
905
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000906- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
907
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000908- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
909 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000910
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000911- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
912
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000913- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
914
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000915- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000916 the source code is updated and reloaded.
917
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000918Build
919-----
920
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000921- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000922
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000923What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
924================================
925
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000926*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000927
928Core and builtins
929-----------------
930
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000931- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000932 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
933
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000934- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
935 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
936 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
937 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
938
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000939- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
940 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
941
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000942- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
943 constant.
944
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000945- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
946 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
947 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
948 large), and to anomalies such as
949 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
950 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
951 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
952 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000953
954Extension modules
955-----------------
956
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000957- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
958 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000959 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
960 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
961 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000962
963Library
964-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000965
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000966- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000967 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000968 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
969 --swig-cpp.
970
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000971- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
972 it is set.
973
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000974- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000975
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000976- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
977 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
978 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
979 Closes bug #1039270.
980
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000981- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000982
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000983 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000984 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
985 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
986 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
987 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
988 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
989 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
990 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
991 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
992 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
993 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
994 + Updates to documentation.
995
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000996- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
997 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
998 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
999 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1000
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001001- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001002
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001003- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1004 applications should use the getmember function.
1005
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001006- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1007
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001008- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1009 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1010 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1011 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1012 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1013 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1014 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1015 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1016 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1017
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001018- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1019 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001020 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001021
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001022- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1023 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1024 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1025 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1026 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1027 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1028 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1029 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001030
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001031- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1032 the new public features (of which there are many).
1033
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001034- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001035 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1036 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1037 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1038 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001039 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001040
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001041- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1042
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001043- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1044 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1045 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1046 options.
1047
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001048- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1049 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1050 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1051 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1052 conditions under which non-string values work.
1053
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001054Build
1055-----
1056
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001057- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1058 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1059 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1060
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001061- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1062 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1063 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1064 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1065 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001066
1067C API
1068-----
1069
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001070- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1071 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1072
1073- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1074
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001075- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1076 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1077 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1078 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1079 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1080 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1081 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1082 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1083 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1084
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001085- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1086
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001087- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1088 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1089 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001090
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001091Tests
1092-----
1093
1094- test__locale ported to unittest
1095
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001096Mac
1097---
1098
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001099- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1100 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1101 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001102
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001103Tools/Demos
1104-----------
1105
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001106- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1107 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1108 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1109 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1110 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001111
1112
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001113What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1114=================================
1115
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001116*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001117
1118Core and builtins
1119-----------------
1120
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001121- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001122 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1123
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001124- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1125 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1126 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1127 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1128 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1129 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1130 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1131 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001132 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1133 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1134 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1135 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1136 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001137
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001138- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1139 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1140 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1141 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1142 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1143
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001144- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1145
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001146- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1147 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1148
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001149- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1150 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1151 modified the list.
1152
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001153- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1154 functions is now writable.
1155
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001156- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1157 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1158 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1159 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1160
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001161- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1162 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1163 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1164 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1165 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001166
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001167- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1168 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1169
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001170Extension modules
1171-----------------
1172
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001173- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1174
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001175- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1176 data.
1177
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001178- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1179 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1180 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1181 supposed to have been truncated away.
1182
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001183- Added socket.socketpair().
1184
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001185- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1186 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1187
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001188- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001189 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1190
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001191Library
1192-------
1193
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001194- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001195 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001196
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001197- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1198 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1199
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001200- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1201 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1202
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001203- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1204
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001205- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1206 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001207
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001208- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1209 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1210
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001211- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1212
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001213- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1214
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001215- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1216
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001217- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1218 Percivall.
1219
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001220- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1221 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1222
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001223- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1224 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1225 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001226 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001227
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001228- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1229 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1230 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1231 and exponent.
1232
1233- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1234
1235- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001236 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001237 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1238
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001239- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1240 to the readline module.
1241
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001242- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001243 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1244 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001245
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001246- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1247 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1248 contains symlinks.
1249
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001250- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1251 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1252
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001253- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1254 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1255 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1256
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001257- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1258 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1259 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1260 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1261 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1262 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1263 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1264 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1265 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1266 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1267 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1268 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1269 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1270
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001271- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1272
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001273Tools/Demos
1274-----------
1275
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001276- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1277 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1278
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001279- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1280
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001281Build
1282-----
1283
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001284- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1285 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1286 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1287 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1288 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1289 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1290 plans to do so.
1291
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001292- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1293 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1294
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001295- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1296 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1297
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001298- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1299 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1300
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001301- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1302 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1303
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001304- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1305 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1306
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001307C API
1308-----
1309
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001310..
1311
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001312Documentation
1313-------------
1314
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001315- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1316 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1317
1318- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1319 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1320 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001321
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001322New platforms
1323-------------
1324
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001325- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1326
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001327Tests
1328-----
1329
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001330..
1331
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001332Windows
1333-------
1334
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001335- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1336 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1337 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1338 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1339 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1340 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1341 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1342 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1343 the problem.
1344
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001345Mac
1346---
1347
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001348..
1349
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001350
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001351What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1352=================================
1353
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001354*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001355
1356Core and builtins
1357-----------------
1358
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001359- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1360 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1361 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1362 sensitive code.
1363
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001364- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001365 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001366
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001367 @staticmethod
1368 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001369
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001370 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001371
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001372- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1373 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1374 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1375 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1376 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1377 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1378 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1379 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1380 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1381 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1382 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1383
1384 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1385 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1386 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1387 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1388 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1389 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1390 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1391
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001392- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1393 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1394
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001395- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001396 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001397
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001398- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001399 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001400 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1401
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001402- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001403 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1404 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1405
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001406- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1407 types that support garbage collection.
1408
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001409- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1410
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001411- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1412 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1413 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1414 Jython.
1415
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001416- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1417
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001418- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1419 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1420
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001421- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1422 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1423 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001424
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001425- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1426 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1427 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1428
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001429Extension modules
1430-----------------
1431
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001432- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1433
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001434Library
1435-------
1436
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001437- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1438 TIS-620
1439
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001440- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1441 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1442 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1443 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1444 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1445 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1446 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1447 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1448 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1449 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1450
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001451- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1452
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001453- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1454 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1455 same as when the argument is omitted).
1456 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1457
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001458- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1459
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001460- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1461 schemes are offered.
1462
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001463- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1464
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001465- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1466 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1467 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1468
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001469- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1470
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001471- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1472 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1473
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001474- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1475 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1476 when dummy_threading is being used.
1477
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001478- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1479 from a tarfile.
1480
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001481- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001482 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001483
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001484- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1485 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1486 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1487 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1488
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001489- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1490 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1491
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001492- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1493 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1494 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1495 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1496 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1497 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1498 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1499 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1500 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1501 by some other method in progress).
1502
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001503- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1504 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1505 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001506
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001507- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1508
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001509- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1510 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1511 AM Kuchling.
1512
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001513- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1514 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1515 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1516
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001517- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1518 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1519 instead of unsigned.
1520
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001521- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001522 no longer part of the public API.
1523
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001524- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1525 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1526 string methods of the same name).
1527
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001528- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001529 SF patch 945642.
1530
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001531- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1532
1533 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1534
1535 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1536 DocTestSuites.
1537
1538- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1539 that provide thread-local data.
1540
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001541- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1542 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1543
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001544- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1545
1546- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1547 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1548 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1549
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001550- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1551
1552 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1553 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1554 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001555
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001556 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1557 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1558 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1559 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1560
1561 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1562 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1563
1564 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1565 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1566 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1567 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1568
1569 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1570 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1571 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1572 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1573 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1574
1575 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1576 wrapping help output.
1577
1578 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1579 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1580 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001581
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001582C API
1583-----
1584
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001585- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1586 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1587 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1588 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1589 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1590 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1591 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1592 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1593 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1594 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1595 its visible semantics have not changed.
1596
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001597- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1598 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1599
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001600Documentation
1601-------------
1602
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001603- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001604
1605 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001606 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001607
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001608 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001609
1610 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1611
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001612- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001613
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001614Tests
1615-----
1616
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001617- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001618 platforms that use the Makefile.
1619
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001620- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1621 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1622 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1623
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001624
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001625What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1626=================================
1627
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001628*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001629
1630Core and builtins
1631-----------------
1632
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001633- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1634 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1635 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1636 objects now (one object instead of three).
1637
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001638- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1639 Windows DLLs.
1640
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001641- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1642 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001643
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001644- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1645 a new .pyc magic.
1646
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001647- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1648 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1649 be there.
1650
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001651- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1652 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1653 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1654
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001655- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1656 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1657 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1658
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001659- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1660
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001661- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1662 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1663 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001664
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001665- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1666 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1667
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001668- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1669
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001670- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001671 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001672
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001673- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1674
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001675- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1676
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001677- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1678 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1679
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001680- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1681 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1682 Fixes bug #858016 .
1683
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001684- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1685 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1686 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1687
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001688- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1689 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1690 improves their performance (about 35%).
1691
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001692- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1693 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1694 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1695
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001696- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1697 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1698 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1699 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1700
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001701- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1702 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001703 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001704 length is not known).
1705
1706- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1707 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001708 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1709 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001710 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1711
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001712- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1713 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1714
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001715- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1716 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1717 keyword arguments.
1718
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001719- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1720 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1721 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1722
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001723- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1724 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1725 cases.
1726
1727- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1728 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1729 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1730 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1731 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1732 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1733 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1734 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1735 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1736 a release build.
1737
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001738- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1739 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1740
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001741- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001742 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001743
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001744- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1745 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1746 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1747 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1748 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1749 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1750 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1751 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1752 destroyed.
1753
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001754- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1755 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1756 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1757 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1758 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1759 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1760 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1761 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1762
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001763- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1764 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1765 character other than a space.
1766
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001767- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1768 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1769 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1770 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1771 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1772 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1773 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1774 attributes with the same name.
1775
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001776- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1777 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1778 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1779 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1780 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1781 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1782 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1783 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1784 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1785 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1786 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1787 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1788 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1789 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001790
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001791- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1792 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1793 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1794 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1795 This has been repaired.
1796
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001797- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1798
1799- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1800
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001801- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1802 over a sequence.
1803
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001804- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001805 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001806
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001807- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1808
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001809- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1810 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1811 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1812 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1813 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1814 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1815 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1816 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1817
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001818- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1819 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1820 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1821
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001822- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1823 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1824 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1825 freelist.
1826
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001827- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1828 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1829
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001830- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1831 number.
1832
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001833- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1834 a TypeError exception.
1835
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001836- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1837 820195.
1838
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001839- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1840 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1841 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1842
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001843- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001844 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1845 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001846
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001847- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1848 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1849 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1850
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001851- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1852 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001853 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001854
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001855- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001856 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1857 the first call.
1858
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001859
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001860Extension modules
1861-----------------
1862
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001863- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1864 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1865
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001866- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1867 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1868 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1869 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1870 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1871 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1872 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001873
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001874- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1875
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001876- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1877
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001878- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1879 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1880
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001881- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1882 fewer false positives.
1883
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001884- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1885 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1886
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001887- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001888 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1889
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001890- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001891 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001892 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001893 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1894 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001895
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001896- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1897 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1898 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1899 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1900
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001901- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1902 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1903 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1904 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1905 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1906 #897625.
1907
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001908- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1909 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1910
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001911- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1912 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1913 and pops on either side of the deque.
1914
1915- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1916 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1917
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001918- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1919 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1920 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1921 other functions that expect a function argument.
1922
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001923- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1924
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001925- os.getsid was added.
1926
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001927- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1928 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1929 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1930
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001931- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1932
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001933- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1934
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001935- readline.clear_history was added.
1936
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001937- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1938
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001939- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1940
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001941- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1942
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001943- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1944
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001945- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1946
1947- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1948
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001949- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1950
1951- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1952
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001953- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1954 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1955 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1956
1957- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1958 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1959 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1960 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1961 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1962 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1963 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1964
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001965- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1966 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1967 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1968 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001969
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001970- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001971 iterators from a single iterable.
1972
1973- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1974 of raising a TypeError exception.
1975
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001976- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1977 as parameter.
1978
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001979Library
1980-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001981
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001982- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1983
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001984- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1985 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1986 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001987
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001988- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1989 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1990 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001991
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001992- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001993
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001994- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1995 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001996
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001997- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1998 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1999
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002000- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2001
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002002- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002003 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002004
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002005- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002006 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002007
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002008- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2009
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002010- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2011 on cygwin and mingw32.
2012
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002013- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2014
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002015- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2016 module.
2017
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002018- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2019 installation scheme for all platforms.
2020
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002021- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002022 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002023
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002024- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2025 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2026 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2027
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002028- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2029 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2030 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2031
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002032- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2033
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002034- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2035
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002036- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2037 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2038
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002039- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2040 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2041 type pattern with the same value exists.
2042
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002043- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2044 when run from the command prompt).
2045
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002046- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2047 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2048
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002049- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2050 default sort).
2051
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002052- Added global runctx function to profile module
2053
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002054- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2055
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002056- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2057
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002058- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2059
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002060- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002061 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2062 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2063 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2064 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2065 accordingly.
2066
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002067- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2068 decoding standards.
2069
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002070- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2071 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2072 called for all requests.
2073
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002074- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2075 they are passed to the compiler.
2076
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002077- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2078 indent, width and depth.
2079
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002080- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2081 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2082
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002083- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2084 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2085
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002086- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2087
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002088- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2089
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002090- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2091
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002092- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2093 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2094
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002095- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002096 for better performance.
2097
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002098- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002099
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002100- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2101 a string).
2102
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002103- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2104
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002105- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2106
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002107- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2108
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002109- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2110
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002111- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2112 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2113 list of fieldnames.
2114
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002115- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2116 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2117
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002118- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2119
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002120- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2121 empty lists.
2122
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002123- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2124 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2125 and shelves.
2126
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002127- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2128 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2129
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002130- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002131 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2132 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002133
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002134- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2135 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002136 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002137
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002138- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002139 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2140 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2141
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002142- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2143 and removed in Py2.4.
2144
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002145- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2146
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002147- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2148
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002149Tools/Demos
2150-----------
2151
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002152- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2153 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2154
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002155- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2156
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002157- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2158 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2159 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2160 destination in situations where both files are given.
2161
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002162- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2163 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2164 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2165 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2166
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002167- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2168
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002169- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2170 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2171 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2172 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2173 now.
2174
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002175- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2176 in effect
2177
2178- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2179 C-c C-h
2180
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002181- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2182 -d option was given.
2183
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002184Build
2185-----
2186
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002187- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2188 build under OS X.
2189
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002190- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2191 --enable-profiling.
2192
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002193- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2194 is configured --with-tsc.
2195
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002196- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2197 on AMD64.
2198
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002199- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2200 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2201
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002202- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2203 removed.
2204
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002205- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2206 supported (see PEP 11).
2207
2208- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2209
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002210- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2211
2212- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2213 (see PEP 11).
2214
2215- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2216 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2217
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002218C API
2219-----
2220
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002221- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2222 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2223 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2224
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002225- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2226 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2227 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2228 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2229
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002230- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2231 generator objects.
2232
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002233- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2234 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002235 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2236 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002237
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002238- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2239 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2240
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002241- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2242 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2243 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2244 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2245 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2246
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002247- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2248 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2249 about 10% faster.
2250
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002251- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2252 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2253
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002254- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2255 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2256 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2257 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2258
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002259Windows
2260-------
2261
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002262- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2263 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2264 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2265 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2266
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002267- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2268 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2269 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2270
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002271
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002272What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2273===============================
2274
2275*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2276
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002277IDLE
2278----
2279
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002280- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2281 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2282 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2283 context-menu actions.
2284
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002285- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2286 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2287 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2288 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2289 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2290 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2291 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2292 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2293 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2294
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002295
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002296What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2297=============================================
2298
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002299*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002300
2301Core and builtins
2302-----------------
2303
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002304- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002305 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002306 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2307
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002308Extension modules
2309-----------------
2310
2311- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2312 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2313 than once. This has been fixed.
2314
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002315- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2316 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2317 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2318 call.
2319
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002320- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2321
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002322Library
2323-------
2324
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002325- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2326 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2327
2328- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2329 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2330 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2331 restored.
2332
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002333IDLE
2334----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002335
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002336- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002337
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002338Build
2339-----
2340
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002341- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2342 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2343
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002344C API
2345-----
2346
2347Windows
2348-------
2349
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002350- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2351 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2352
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002353- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2354
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002355Mac
2356---
2357
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002358- Various fixes to pimp.
2359
2360- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2361
2362- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2363 more problems than it solves.
2364
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002365
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002366What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2367=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002368
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002369*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2370
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002371Core and builtins
2372-----------------
2373
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002374- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2375 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2376
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002377- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2378 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002379 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002380
2381- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2382 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2383 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002384 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002385
2386- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2387 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002388
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002389- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2390 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2391 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2392
2393- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002394 770247.
2395
2396- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002397
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002398Extension modules
2399-----------------
2400
2401- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2402 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2403
2404- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2405
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002406- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2407
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002408- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2409 contained within the _strptime module.
2410
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002411- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2412 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2413
2414- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002415 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2416
2417- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2418 the find_class attribute, if present.
2419
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002420- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002421
2422 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2423 (SF bug 763298).
2424
2425 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002426 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2427 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2428 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002429
2430 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2431
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002432Library
2433-------
2434
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002435- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2436
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002437- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2438 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2439 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2440 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2441 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2442 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2443 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2444 or Tester().
2445
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002446- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2447 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2448 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2449 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2450 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2451 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2452 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2453 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2454 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002455
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002456 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002457
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002458- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2459 weren't before was an oversight.
2460
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002461- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2462 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2463
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002464- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2465 when there are no lines.
2466
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002467- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2468 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2469
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002470- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2471 to child processes.
2472
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002473- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2474
2475- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2476
2477- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2478 xmlrpclib.
2479
2480- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2481 responses.
2482
2483- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2484 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2485
2486- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2487 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2488 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2489
2490- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2491 used as patterns.
2492
2493- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2494 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2495 than Tk 8.3.
2496
2497- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2498
2499- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002500
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002501Tools/Demos
2502-----------
2503
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002504- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2505
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002506- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2507
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002508- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002509
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002510Build
2511-----
2512
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002513- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2514
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002515- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2516
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002517- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2518 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002519
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002520- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2521 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2522 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002523
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002524C API
2525-----
2526
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002527- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2528 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2529
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002530Windows
2531-------
2532
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002533- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2534 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2535 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2536 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2537 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2538 Python exception ::
2539
2540 thread.error: can't start new thread
2541
2542 is raised now.
2543
2544- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2545 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2546 instead of from DLL teardown.
2547
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002548Mac
2549---
2550
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002551- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002552 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002553 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2554 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2555 the executable in the bundle.
2556
2557- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002558
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002559- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2560
2561- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2562 on Panther.
2563
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002564What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2565================================
2566
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002567*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002568
2569Core and builtins
2570-----------------
2571
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002572- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2573 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2574 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2575 with the -i option.
2576
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002577- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2578 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2579
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002580- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2581 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2582
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002583- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2584 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2585 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2586 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2587 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2588 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2589 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2590 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2591 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2592 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2593 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2594 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2595 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002596
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002597- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2598 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2599 embedded in a lambda expression.
2600
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002601- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2602 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2603 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2604 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2605 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2606
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002607- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2608 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2609 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2610
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002611- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2612 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2613
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002614- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2615 It's writable again.
2616
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002617- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2618 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2619 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002620 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002621
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002622- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2623 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2624 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2625
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002626Extension modules
2627-----------------
2628
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002629- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2630 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2631
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002632- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2633 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2634 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2635 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2636
2637- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2638 collection.
2639
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002640- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2641 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2642 unique within a single program run.
2643
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002644- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2645 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2646
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002647- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2648 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2649
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002650- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2651 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002652
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002653- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2654
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002655- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2656 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2657
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002658- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2659 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2660 for many BSD-derived systems.
2661
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002662
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002663Library
2664-------
2665
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002666- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2667 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2668 primary ones:
2669
2670 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2671 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2672 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2673
2674 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2675 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2676 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2677 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2678 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2679 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2680
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002681- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2682 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2683 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2684 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2685 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2686 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2687 argument.
2688
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002689- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2690 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2691 in the archive.
2692
2693- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2694 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2695
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002696- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2697 569574).
2698
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002699- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2700 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2701 no more.
2702
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002703- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2704 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2705 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2706 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2707 code coverage.
2708
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002709- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2710 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2711 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002712 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2713 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002714
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002715- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2716 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2717 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002718 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002719
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002720- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2721
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002722- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2723 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2724 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2725 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2726
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002727- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2728 handling.
2729
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002730- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2731 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2732
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002733- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2734 in socket.py.
2735
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002736- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2737
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002738- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2739 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2740 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2741 opener with proxy support.
2742
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002743- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2744
2745- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2746
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002747Tools/Demos
2748-----------
2749
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002750- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2751
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002752- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2753
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002754- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2755 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002756
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002757- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2758 files.
2759
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002760Build
2761-----
2762
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002763- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002764 different root directory.
2765
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002766C API
2767-----
2768
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002769- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2770 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2771 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2772 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2773 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2774 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2775 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2776 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2777 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2778 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2779
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002780- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2781 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2782 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2783 from Python.
2784
2785
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002786New platforms
2787-------------
2788
2789None this time.
2790
2791Tests
2792-----
2793
2794- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2795 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2796
2797Windows
2798-------
2799
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002800- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2801
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002802- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2803 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2804 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2805 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2806 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2807 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2808 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2809 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2810 that's what it's for.
2811
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002812Mac
2813---
2814
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002815- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2816 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2817 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2818 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002819- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2820 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2821- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002822
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002823SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2824------------------------------------
2825
2826430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2827598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2828622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2829661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2830683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2831697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2832713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2833724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2834727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2835729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2836730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2837731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2838732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2839733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2840735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2841740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2842744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2843745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2844747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2845749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2846751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2847753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2848755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2849757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2850760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2851
2852
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002853What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2854================================
2855
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002856*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002857
2858Core and builtins
2859-----------------
2860
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002861- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2862 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2863
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002864- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2865 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2866 and cannot be strings).
2867
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002868- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2869 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2870 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2871 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2872
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002873- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2874 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2875 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2876 Python itself.
2877
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002878- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2879 the referenced object, if it has one.
2880
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002881- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2882 the thread started at
2883 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2884
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002885- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2886 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2887 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2888 placed on a list index.
2889
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002890- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2891 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2892 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2893 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2894
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002895- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2896 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2897 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2898 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2899 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2900 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2901 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2902
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002903- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2904 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2905 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2906 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2907 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2908
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002909- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2910 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002911
2912- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2913 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2914 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2915 #693195.)
2916
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002917- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2918 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002919
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002920- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002921 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002922 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2923 interpreter executions, would fail.
2924
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002925- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002926 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002927 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002928
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002929Extension modules
2930-----------------
2931
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002932- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2933 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2934 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2935 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2936
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002937- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2938 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2939
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002940- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2941 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2942 and Greg Chapman.)
2943
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002944- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2945 recursively.
2946
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002947- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002948 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2949 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2950 leaks.
2951
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002952- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2953
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002954- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2955 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2956 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2957 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2958 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2959 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2960 #705836.
2961
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002962- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002963 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2964
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002965- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2966 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2967 See SF bug #692416.
2968
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002969- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2970 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2971
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002972- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2973 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2974 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002975
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002976- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002977 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2978 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2979
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002980- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2981 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2982 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2983 timeouts to work properly.
2984
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002985Library
2986-------
2987
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002988- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2989 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2990 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2991 future release.
2992
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002993- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2994 for querying platform dependent features.
2995
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002996- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002997
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002998- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2999 pickle protocol versions.
3000
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003001- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3002 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3003 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3004
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003005- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3006
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003007- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3008 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3009 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3010 modules.
3011
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003012- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3013 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3014 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3015
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003016- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3017 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3018
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003019- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3020 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3021 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3022
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003023- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003024 MS Office extensions.
3025
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003026- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3027 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3028
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003029- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3030 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3031
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003032- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3033 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3034 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3035 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3036 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3037 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3038
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003039- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3040 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3041 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003042
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003043- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3044 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3045 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3046
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003047- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3048
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003049- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3050 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3051 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3052
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003053Tools/Demos
3054-----------
3055
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003056- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3057 See the module docstring for details.
3058
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003059Build
3060-----
3061
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003062- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3063 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003064
3065C API
3066-----
3067
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003068- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3069
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003070- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3071 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3072 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3073
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003074- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3075 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003076
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003077 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3078 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3079 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003080
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003081- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003082 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3083
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003084- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3085 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3086 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003087
3088New platforms
3089-------------
3090
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003091None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003092
3093Tests
3094-----
3095
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003096- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3097 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003098
3099Windows
3100-------
3101
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003102- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3103 function.
3104
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003105- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3106 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003107
3108Mac
3109---
3110
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003111- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3112 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003113
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003114- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3115 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003116
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003117- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3118 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3119 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003120
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003121- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003122 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3123 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003124
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003125- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3126 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003127
3128
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003129What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3130=================================
3131
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003132*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003133
3134Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003135-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003136
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003137- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3138 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3139 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3140
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003141- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3142 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3143 (SF patch #664376.)
3144
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003145- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3146 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3147 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3148 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3149 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3150 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003151 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003152
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003153- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3154 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3155 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3156 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003157 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003158
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003159- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3160 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3161 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3162 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3163 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3164 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3165 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3166 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3167 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3168 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3169 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3170
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003171- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3172 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3173 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3174 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3175 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3176 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3177
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003178- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3179 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3180
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003181- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3182 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3183 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3184 case.)
3185
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003186- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3187 passed as unicode strings.
3188
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003189- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3190 See SF bug #683467.
3191
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003192- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3193 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3194
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003195- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3196
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003197- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3198
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003199- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3200 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3201 arguments.
3202
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003203- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3204 See SF bug #667147.
3205
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003206- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003207 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003208 See SF bug #676155.
3209
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003210- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003211 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003212 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3213 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3214 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3215 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3216 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3217 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003218
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003219Extension modules
3220-----------------
3221
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003222- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3223 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3224 tp_as_number pointer.
3225
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003226- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3227 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3228 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3229 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3230 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3231
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003232- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3233
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003234- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3235
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003236- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003237 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003238 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3239 patch #678531.)
3240
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003241- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3242 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3243
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003244- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3245 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3246
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003247- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3248
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003249- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3250 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3251 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3252
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003253- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3254
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003255- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3256 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3257
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003258- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003259
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003260- datetime changes:
3261
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003262 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3263
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003264 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3265 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3266 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3267 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3268 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3269 now.
3270
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003271 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003272 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3273 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003274
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003275 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003276 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003277 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3278 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3279 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3280 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003281
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003282 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3283 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3284 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003285 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3286
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003287 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3288 by a later example coded by Guido.
3289
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003290 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003291 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3292 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3293 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003294 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3295 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3296
3297 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3298 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3299 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3300 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3301 tzinfo subclass instance.
3302
3303 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3304 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3305 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3306 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3307 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3308 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3309 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3310 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003311
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003312 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3313 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3314 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3315 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3316 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003317 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3318
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003319 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003320
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003321 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3322 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3323 as a naive datetime object.
3324
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003325 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3326 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3327 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3328
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003329 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3330 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3331 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3332 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3333 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3334 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3335 comparison.
3336
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003337 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3338 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3339 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3340 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003341 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003342
3343 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003344
3345 and ::
3346
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003347 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3348
3349 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3350 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3351 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3352 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3353
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003354 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3355 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3356 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3357 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3358 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3359
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003360 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3361 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003362 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3363 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003364
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003365Library
3366-------
3367
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003368- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3369 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3370
3371- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3372 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3373 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3374 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3375 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3376 See PEP 307 for details.
3377
3378- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3379 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3380
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003381- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3382 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003383 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003384 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3385 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003386 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003387
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003388- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3389 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3390
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003391- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3392 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3393 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3394
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003395- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3396
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003397- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3398 exception.
3399
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003400- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3401 class.
3402
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003403- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3404 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3405 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3406
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003407- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3408 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3409
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003410- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003411 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3412 See SF bug #659228.
3413
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003414- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3415 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3416 See SF patch #651082.
3417
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003418- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003419
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003420- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3421 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3422
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003423- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003424 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003425
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003426- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3427 DOS paths from other platforms.
3428
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003429Tools/Demos
3430-----------
3431
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003432- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3433 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3434 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3435 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3436 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3437 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3438 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3439 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3440 example:
3441
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003442 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3443 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003444
3445 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3446
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003447
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003448Build
3449-----
3450
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003451- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3452 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3453 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003454 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3455
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003456 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3457
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003458- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3459 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3460 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3461 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3462 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3463 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3464 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3465 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3466 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3467
3468- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3469 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3470 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3471 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3472
3473- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3474 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3475
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003476C API
3477-----
3478
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003479- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3480 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003481
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003482- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3483 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3484 tp_as_number pointer.
3485
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003486- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3487 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3488 (SF #681367)
3489
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003490- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3491 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3492 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3493 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003494
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003495Tests
3496-----
3497
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003498- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003499 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3500 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3501 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3502 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3503 pydoc.)
3504
3505- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3506
3507- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003508
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003509Windows
3510-------
3511
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003512- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3513 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3514 time).
3515
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003516- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3517 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3518
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003519- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3520 release without strong cryptography.
3521
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003522- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003523 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003524
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003525- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3526 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3527
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003528Mac
3529---
3530
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003531- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3532 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003533
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003534- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3535 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3536 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003537
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003538- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3539 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003540
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003541- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3542 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3543 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3544 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003545
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003546- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003547 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3548 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3549 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003550
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003551
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003552What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003553=================================
3554
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003555*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003556
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003557Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003558--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003559
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003560- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3561
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003562- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3563 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003564 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003565 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003566 a different meaning than before.
3567
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003568- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003569 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003570 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003571
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003572- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003573 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003574 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003575
3576- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3577 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3578 and deallocation.
3579
3580- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3581 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3582
3583- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3584 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3585 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3586 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3587 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3588
3589- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3590 now detected by the garbage collector.
3591
3592- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3593 [SF bug 519621]
3594
3595- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3596 identifier.
3597
3598- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3599 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3600 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3601 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3602 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3603 [SF bug 563060]
3604
3605- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3606 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3607 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3608 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3609 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3610
3611- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3612 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3613 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3614
3615- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3616
3617- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3618 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3619 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3620 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3621 state of the slots would be lost.)
3622
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003623Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003624-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003625
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003626- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003627 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3628 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3629 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3630 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003631 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3632 Jython 2.1.
3633
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003634- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003635 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003636 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3637 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3638 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3639 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3640 these, see PEP 302.
3641
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003642- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3643 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3644 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3645
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003646- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3647 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3648 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3649
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003650- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3651 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3652 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3653
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003654- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3655 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3656 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3657 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3658 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3659 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3660 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3661 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3662 releases or implementations.
3663
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003664- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003665 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3666 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003667
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003668- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3669 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3670
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003671- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3672 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3673 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3674
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003675- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3676 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3677
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003678- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3679 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003680 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3681 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003682
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003683- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3684 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3685 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3686 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3687 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3688
3689 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3690 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3691 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3692 pattern.
3693
3694 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3695 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3696 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3697 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3698
3699 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3700 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3701 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3702 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3703 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3704 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3705
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003706- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3707 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3708 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3709 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3710 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3711 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3712 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3713 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003714
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003715- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3716 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3717 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3718 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3719 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003720 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3721 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3722 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3723 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3724 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3725 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3726 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003727
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003728- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3729 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3730
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003731- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3732 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3733 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3734 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3735 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3736 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3737 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3738 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3739 to Zack Weinberg!
3740
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003741- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3742 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3743 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3744 type. This has been fixed now.
3745
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003746- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3747 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3748 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3749
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003750- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3751 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3752 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3753 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3754 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3755 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3756 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3757 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003758 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003759
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003760- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3761 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3762 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003763
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003764- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3765 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3766 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3767 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3768 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3769 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3770 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3771 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003772 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003773 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3774 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3775
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003776- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3777 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3778 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3779 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3780 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3781 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3782 this.)
3783
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003784- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3785 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003786 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003787 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003788 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3789 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003790 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3791 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003792
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003793- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3794 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3795 currently running.
3796
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003797- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3798 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3799 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3800 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3801
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003802- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3803 as directory names.
3804
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003805- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3806 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3807
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003808- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3809 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3810
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003811- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003812 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3813 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003814
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003815- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3816 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3817 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3818 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3819 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3820
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003821- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3822 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3823 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3824 removed.
3825
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003826- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3827 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3828 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3829
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003830- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3831 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3832 to __debug__.
3833
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003834- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3835 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3836 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3837
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003838- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3839 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3840 deprecated now.
3841
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003842- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3843 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3844 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003845
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003846- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3847 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3848 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3849 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3850 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003851
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003852- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3853 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3854
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003855- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3856 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3857 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003858 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003859 is backward compatible.
3860
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003861- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3862 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3863 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3864 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3865 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3866
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003867- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3868 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3869 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3870 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3871 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3872 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003873
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003874- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3875 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3876
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003877- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3878 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3879
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003880- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3881 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3882 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3883 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3884 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3885
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003886- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3887 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3888 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3889
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003890- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003891 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3892
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003893- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3894 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3895 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003896
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003897- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3898 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3899
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003900- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3901 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3902 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3903
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003904- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3905
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003906Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003907-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003908
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003909- Added three operators to the operator module:
3910 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3911 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3912 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3913
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003914- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3915
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003916- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3917 archives.
3918
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003919- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3920 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3921 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3922
3923 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3924
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003925- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3926 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3927 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003928 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003929
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003930- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3931 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3932 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3933 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003934 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3935 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3936 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3937 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003938
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003939- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3940 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003941
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003942- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3943
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003944- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3945 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3946
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003947- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3948 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3949 supported.
3950
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003951- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3952
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003953- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3954 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003955
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003956- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3957 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3958
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003959- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3960
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003961- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3962 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3963
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003964- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3965 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3966 functions but callable type objects.
3967
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003968- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003969 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003970 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003971
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003972- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3973 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003974
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003975- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3976 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003977
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003978- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3979 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3980 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3981 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3982
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003983- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3984 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003985
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003986- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3987 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3988 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3989 and __imul__.
3990
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003991- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003992 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3993 is called.
3994
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003995- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3996 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3997 interpreter was compiled.
3998
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003999- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4000 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4001 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004002 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004003 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4004 1, not 2.
4005
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004006- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4007 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4008 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4009 limit.
4010
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004011- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4012 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4013 bug #623464.
4014
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004015- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4016 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4017 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4018 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4019
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004020Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004021-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004022
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004023- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4024
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004025- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4026 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4027 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4028 with Python 2.3a2.
4029
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004030- os.path exposes getctime.
4031
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004032- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004033 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004034 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004035 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004036 unit tests of floating point results.
4037
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004038- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4039 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4040 has been increased.
4041
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004042- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4043 executed.
4044
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004045- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4046 postinstallation script.
4047
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004048- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4049 test the current module.
4050
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004051- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004052 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4053 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4054 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4055 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4056
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004057- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004058 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004059 Ward's Optik package.
4060
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004061- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4062 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4063 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4064 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4065
4066- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4067 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004068 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004069
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004070- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4071 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4072 shelf are binary pickles.
4073
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004074- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4075 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4076
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004077- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4078 modules are iterators now.
4079
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004080- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4081 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4082 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4083 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4084 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4085 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004086
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004087- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4088 with their entity value.
4089
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004090- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4091
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004092- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4093 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004094
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004095- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4096 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004097 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004098
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004099- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4100 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4101 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4102 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4103 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4104 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4105 main():
4106
4107 import locale
4108 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4109
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004110- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4111 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4112
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004113- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4114 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4115 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4116 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4117 to the new standard.
4118
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004119- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4120 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4121 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4122 an extension to the database.
4123
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004124- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4125 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4126 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4127 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004128 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004129
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004130- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004131 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004132
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004133- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4134 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4135 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4136 bounded integers.
4137
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004138- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4139 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4140 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4141 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4142 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4143 in existence.
4144
4145 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4146 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4147 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4148 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4149 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4150 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4151
4152 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4153 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4154 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4155 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4156
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004157- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4158 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4159 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4160
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004161- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4162
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004163- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4164 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4165 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4166 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4167
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004168- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4169 argument.
4170
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004171- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4172 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4173 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4174 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4175 [SF patch 560794].
4176
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004177- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4178 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4179 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004180 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4181 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4182 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004183
4184- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4185 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004186
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004187- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4188 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4189 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4190 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004191
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004192- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4193 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4194 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4195 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4196 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4197
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004198- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004199
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004200- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4201
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004202- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4203 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4204 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4205 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4206 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4207 identical to None.
4208
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004209- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4210 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4211 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4212 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4213 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4214 results now.
4215
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004216- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4217 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4218
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004219- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4220 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4221 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4222 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4223 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4224 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4225 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4226 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4227
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004228- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4229
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004230- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4231 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4232
4233- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4234 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4235 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4236 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4237 and other systems.
4238
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004239- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4240 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4241 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4242 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 +00004243 work well with these.
4244
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004245- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4246
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004247- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004248 connections.
4249
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004250- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4251 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4252 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4253
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004254- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4255 sets
4256
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004257- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4258 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4259 name.
4260
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004261- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4262 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4263 passed in.
4264
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004265- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004266 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004267 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4268 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004269
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004270- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4271
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004272- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4273
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004274- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4275 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4276 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4277
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004278- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4279 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4280 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4281 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004282 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004283
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004284- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004285 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004286 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004287
4288- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4289 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4290 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4291
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004292- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004293 the value of its expression argument.
4294
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004295- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4296 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4297 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4298
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004299- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4300 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4301 skipstone browser was included.
4302
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004303- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4304 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4305
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004306Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004307-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004308
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004309- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4310 names in addition to accepting file names.
4311
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004312- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4313 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4314 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4315 still used and useful.)
4316
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004317- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4318 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4319 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4320 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004321
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004322- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4323 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4324 the generated binary.
4325
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004326Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004327-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004328
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004329- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4330
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004331- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4332 except in the hands of experts.
4333
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004334- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004335 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4336 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4337 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004338
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004339- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4340 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4341 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4342 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4343 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4344 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4345 builds.
4346
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004347- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4348 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4349 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4350 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4351 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4352 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4353 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4354 new type.
4355
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004356- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004357
4358 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4359 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4360 positive infinities.
4361
4362 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4363 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4364 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4365 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4366 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4367 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4368 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4369
4370 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4371
4372 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4373
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004374- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4375 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4376 size of the executable.
4377
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004378- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4379 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4380 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4381 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004382
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004383- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4384
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004385- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4386 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4387 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004388
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004389- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4390 well as Unix.
4391
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004392- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4393 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4394 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4395 modules in the README file for details.
4396
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004397C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004398-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004399
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004400- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4401 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004402 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004403 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004404 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004405
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004406- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4407 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4408 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4409 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4410 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4411 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004412 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004413 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4414 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4415 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4416 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4417 aligned.)
4418
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004419- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4420 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4421 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4422
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004423- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4424 level.
4425
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004426- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4427 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4428 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4429 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4430 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4431
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004432- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4433 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4434 code.
4435
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004436- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4437 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4438 adjusting for negative indices.
4439
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004440- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4441 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4442 object.
4443
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004444- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4445 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4446 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4447
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004448- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4449 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004450
4451- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4452
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004453- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4454 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4455 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4456 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4457
4458- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4459
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004460- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004461
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004462- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004463 without going through the buffer API.
4464
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004465- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004466
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004467- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4468 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4469 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4470 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4471
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004472- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4473 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4474
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004475- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004476 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4477
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004478New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004479-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004480
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004481- OpenVMS is now supported.
4482
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004483- AtheOS is now supported.
4484
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004485- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4486
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004487- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4488
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004489Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004490-----
4491
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004492- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4493 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4494 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004495
4496Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004497-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004498
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004499- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4500 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4501 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4502 bugs.
4503 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004504 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004505 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4506 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004507 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004508
4509- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004510 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004511
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004512- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4513 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4514
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004515- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4516 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004517 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004518 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4519
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004520- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4521 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4522 use files" uninstall option).
4523
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004524- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4525
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004526- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4527 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4528
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004529- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4530 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4531 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4532
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004533- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4534 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4535 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4536 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4537 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004538 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4539 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4540 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004541
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004542- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004543 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004544 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4545 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4546 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4547 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4548 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4549 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4550 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4551 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4552 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4553 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4554 work around.
4555
4556- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4557 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4558 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4559 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4560 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4561 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4562 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4563 specified with O_CREAT too).
4564
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004565Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004566----
4567
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004568- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004569
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004570- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4571 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4572 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4573
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004574- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4575 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4576 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4577
4578- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4579 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4580 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4581 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4582 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4583 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4584 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4585 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004586
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004587- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4588 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4589 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004590
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004591- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4592 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4593 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4594 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4595 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004596
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004597- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4598 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4599 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004600
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004601- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4602 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004603
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004604- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4605 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4606 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4607 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4608 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004609
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004610- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4611 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4612 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4613
4614- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4615 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4616 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004617
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004618- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4619 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4620 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4621 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004622 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004623
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004624- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4625 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004626
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004627- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4628 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004629
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004630- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004631 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004632 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4633 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004634
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004635
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004636What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004637===============================
4638
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004639*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4640
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004641Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004642--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004643
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004644- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4645 with a custom metaclass.
4646
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004647Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004648-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004649
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004650- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4651 are proxies.
4652
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004653Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004654-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004655
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004656- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4657 very short strings.
4658
4659- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4660 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4661 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4662 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4663 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4664
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004665Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004666-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004667
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004668- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4669 close or delete time).
4670
4671- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4672 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4673
4674- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4675
4676- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004677 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004678
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004679Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004680-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004681
4682Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004683-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004684
4685C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004686-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004687
4688New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004689-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004690
4691Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004692-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004693
4694Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004695-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004696
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004697- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4698
4699- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4700 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4701
4702- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4703 deleted at process exit time.
4704
4705- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4706 in backslash.
4707
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004708Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004709----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004710
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004711- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4712 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4713 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4714
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004715
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004716What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004717===========================
4718
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004719*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4720
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004721Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004722--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004723
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004724- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4725 been extensively updated. See
4726
4727 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4728
4729 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4730
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004731- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4732 deleted!
4733
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004734- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4735 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4736 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4737 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4738 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4739
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004740- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4741
4742 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4743 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4744
4745 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4746 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4747 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4748 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4749 supported anyway.
4750
4751 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4752 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4753
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004754- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4755 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4756 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4757 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4758 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004759
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004760- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4761 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4762 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4763
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004764Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004765-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004766
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004767- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4768 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4769 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4770 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4771 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4772 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004773 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4774 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4775 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4776 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004777
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004778- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4779 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4780 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4781
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004782Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004783-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004784
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004785- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4786
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004787Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004788-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004789
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004790- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4791 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4792 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4793 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4794 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4795 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4796
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004797- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4798
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004799- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4800
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004801- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4802
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004803- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4804 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4805 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4806
4807- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4808
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004809Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004810-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004811
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004812- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4813 off a search on Google.
4814
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004815Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004816-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004817
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004818- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4819 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4820 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4821 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4822 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4823 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4824 other platforms should do likewise.
4825
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004826- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4827 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4828 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4829
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004830C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004831-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004832
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004833- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4834 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4835 producing key-value pairs.
4836
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004837- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004838 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004839 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4840 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4841 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4842 previously went unchallenged.
4843
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004844New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004845-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004846
4847Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004848-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004849
4850Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004851-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004852
4853Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004854----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004855
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004856- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4857 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004858
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004859- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4860 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4861 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4862 home.
4863
4864
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004865What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004866===========================
4867
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004868*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4869
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004870Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004871--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004872
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004873- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4874 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004875
4876 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004877 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004878
4879 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4880 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004881 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004882 This needs to be documented.
4883
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004884- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4885 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4886
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004887- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4888 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4889 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4890
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004891- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4892 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4893
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004894- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4895 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4896 class forbids it).
4897
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004898- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4899 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4900 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4901
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004902- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4903
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004904Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004905-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004906
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004907- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4908 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004909 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004910
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004911- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4912 (like 1 + '').
4913
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004914Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004915-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004916
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004917- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4918 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4919 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4920 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004921 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004922 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4923
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004924- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4925 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4926 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4927 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4928
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004929- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4930 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004931 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4932 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4933 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004934
4935- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4936 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004937
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004938- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4939 bytes on its input.
4940
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004941Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004942-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004943
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004944- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004945 convenience function.
4946
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004947- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4948 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4949 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004950 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4951 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4952 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4953 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4954 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4955 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004956
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004957- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4958 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4959 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4960 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4961
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004962- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4963 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4964 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4965
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004966- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4967 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4968 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4969 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4970
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004971- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4972 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004973 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004974 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4975 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4976 new -l and -e options.
4977
4978- statcache is now deprecated.
4979
4980- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4981 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004982 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004983 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4984 time properly taken into account.
4985
4986- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4987 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4988 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4989 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4990
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004991Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004992-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004993
4994Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004995-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004996
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004997- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4998 is built with libdb3 if available.
4999
5000- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5001
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005002C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005003-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005004
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005005- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5006 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5007 PySequence_Size().
5008
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005009- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5010
5011- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5012 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5013 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5014
5015- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5016 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5017
5018- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5019 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5020
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005021New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005022-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005023
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005024- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5025 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5026
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005027- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5028 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5029
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005030- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5031
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005032Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005033-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005034
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005035- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5036 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5037
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005038Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005039-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005040
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005041Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005042----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005043
5044- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5045 removed completely in the next release.
5046
5047- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5048 OSX.
5049
5050- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5051 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5052
5053- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5054
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005055
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005056What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005057===========================
5058
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005059*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5060
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005061Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005062--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005063
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005064- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005065 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005066 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005067 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5068 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005069 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5070 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005071 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5072 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005073
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005074- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5075 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5076
5077- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5078 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5079
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005080Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005081-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005082
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005083- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5084 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5085 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5086 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5087 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5088 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5089 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5090 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5091
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005092- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5093 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5094 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5095 example).
5096
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005097- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005098 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005099 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005100 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005101
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005102- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5103 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5104 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005105 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005106
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005107- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5108 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5109 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5110 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5111 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5112 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5113
5114 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5115
5116 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5117
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005118Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005119-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005120
5121- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5122
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005123- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5124
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005125- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5126 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005127
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005128- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5129 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5130 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5131 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5132 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5133 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005134 attributes.
5135
5136- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5137 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5138 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005139
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005140- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5141 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5142 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005143
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005144- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5145 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5146 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005147 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5148 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5149
5150- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5151 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005152
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005153Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005154-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005155
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005156- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5157 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5158
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005159- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5160 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5161 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5162 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5163
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005164- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5165 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5166 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5167 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5168
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005169 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5170 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5171 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5172 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5173 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5174 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5175 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5176 without losing information).
5177
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005178- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005179 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5180 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5181 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5182 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5183 module).
5184
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005185 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005186 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5187 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5188 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5189 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005190
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005191- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005192 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5193 encoding.
5194
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005195- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5196 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5197
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005198- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005199 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5200
5201- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5202 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5203 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5204 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5205
5206- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5207
5208- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5209 ON, and OFF.
5210
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005211- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5212 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5213
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005214Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005215-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005216
5217- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5218 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5219 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005220
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005221- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5222 been added: -X and -E.
5223
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005224Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005225-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005226
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005227- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5228 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5229
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005230C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005231-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005232
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005233- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5234 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5235 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5236 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5237 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5238
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005239- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5240 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5241 as long) arguments.
5242
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005243- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5244 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5245 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5246 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5247 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5248 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5249
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005250- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5251 input.
5252
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005253New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005254-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005255
5256Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005257-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005258
5259Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005260-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005261
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005262- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5263 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5264 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5265
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005266- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5267 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5268 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005269 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005270
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005271 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5272 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5273 import signal
5274 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005275
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005276 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005277 while 1:
5278 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005279 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005280 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5281 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5282 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5283 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005284
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005285
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005286What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5287===========================
5288
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005289*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5290
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005291Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005292--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005293
5294- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5295 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5296 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5297
5298- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5299 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5300 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5301 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5302 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5303 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5304 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005305
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005306- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005307 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005308 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5309 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5310 associate a docstring with a property.
5311
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005312- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5313 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5314 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5315 other built-in object types.
5316
5317- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5318 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5319 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5320 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5321 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5322
5323- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5324 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5325
5326- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5327 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005328 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005329 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5330 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5331 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5332 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5333 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5334
5335- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5336 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5337 class.
5338
5339- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5340 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5341 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5342 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5343
5344- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5345 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5346 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5347 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5348
5349- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5350 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5351
5352- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5353 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5354 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5355 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5356 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005357 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005358 with the same value as s.
5359
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005360- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5361
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005362Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005363----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005364
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005365- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5366
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005367- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5368 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5369 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5370 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5371 objects.
5372
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005373- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5374 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005375 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5376 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5377
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005378- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5379 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5380 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5381
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005382Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005383-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005384
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005385- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5386 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5387 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5388 by the instances.
5389
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005390- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5391 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5392 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5393
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005394- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5395 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5396 before the entire comparison is complete.
5397
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005398- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5399 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5400 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5401
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005402- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5403 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5404 getwriter().
5405
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005406- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5407 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5408
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005409- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005410 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5411 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5412
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005413- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5414 iterable object.
5415
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005416- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5417 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005418
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005419- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5420 authentication.
5421
5422- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5423 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005424
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005425- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005426 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5427 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5428 a sample driver.)
5429
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005430Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005431-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005432
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005433- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5434 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5435 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5436 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5437 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5438 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5439 kernel has large file support.
5440
5441- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5442 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5443 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5444 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5445 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5446
5447- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5448 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5449 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5450
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005451C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005452-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005453
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005454- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5455 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5456
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005457New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005458-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005459
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005460- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5461 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5462
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005463Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005464-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005465
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005466- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5467 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5468 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5469 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5470 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5471
5472- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5473 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5474 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5475 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5476
5477- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5478 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5479
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005480Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005481-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005482
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005483- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005484 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5485 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005486
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005487
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005488What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5489===========================
5490
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005491*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5492
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005493Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005494----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005495
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005496- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5497 big to represent as a C double.
5498
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005499- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5500 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5501 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5502 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5503 restriction).
5504
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005505- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5506 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5507 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5508 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5509 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5510
5511 >>> dir([])
5512 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5513 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5514 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5515 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5516 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5517 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5518 'reverse', 'sort']
5519
5520 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5521
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005522- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005523 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5524 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5525 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5526 OverflowError exception.
5527
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005528- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005529 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005530 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5531 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5532 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5533 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5534 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005535 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005536 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5537 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5538
5539 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5540 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5541 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5542 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005543
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005544- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005545 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5546 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5547 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5548 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5549 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5550 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5551 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5552 once it is created.
5553
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005554- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5555 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5556 (key, value) pairs.
5557
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005558- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005559 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5560 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5561
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005562- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5563 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5564 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5565 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5566 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005567
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005568- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005569 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5570 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5571
5572 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5573
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005574- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005575 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5576
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005577Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005578-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005579
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005580- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005581 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5582 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005583
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005584- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5585 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5586 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5587 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5588 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5589 in this area anymore).
5590
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005591- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5592 threading.Timer.
5593
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005594- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5595 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5596
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005597- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005598 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5599
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005600- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005601 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5602 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5603 converted to Python longs.
5604
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005605- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005606 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5607
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005608- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5609 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5610 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5611
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005612Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005613-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005614
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005615- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5616 division operators as per PEP 238.
5617
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005618Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005619-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005620
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005621- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5622 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5623 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5624 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5625
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005626C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005627-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005628
5629- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005630
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005631- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5632 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005633 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005634
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005635 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5636 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005637 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005638 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005639
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005640- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005641 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5642 module:
5643
5644 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005645
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005646 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5647 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005648
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005649 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5650 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005651
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005652 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5653
5654 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5655
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005656- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005657 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5658 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5659 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005660
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005661New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005662-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005663
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005664- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5665 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5666 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5667 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5668 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005669
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005670Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005671-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005672
5673Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005674-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005675
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005676- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5677 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5678 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5679 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005680 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5681 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5682 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5683 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5684 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005685
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005686- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005687 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5688
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005689
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005690What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5691===========================
5692
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005693*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5694
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005695Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005696-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005697
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005698- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5699 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5700
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005701- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5702 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5703 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005704
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005705- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5706 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5707 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5708 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005709
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005710- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5711
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005712- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005713
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005714Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005715-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005716
5717- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005718 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005719 the module docstring for details.
5720
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005721Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005722-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005723
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005724- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005725 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5726 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5727 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005728
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005729- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5730 Nick Mathewson.
5731
5732Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005733----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005734
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005735- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5736 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5737 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5738 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5739 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5740 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5741 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5742 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5743
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005744- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5745 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5746 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5747 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5748
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005749- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5750 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5751 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5752 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5753 come a long way).
5754
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005755- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5756 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5757 write filters for these warnings).
5758
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005759- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5760 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5761 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5762 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5763 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5764
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005765- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5766 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5767 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5768 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5769 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5770 older distribution.
5771
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005772Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005773-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005774
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005775- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5776 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005777 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005778
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005779- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5780 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5781 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5782
5783- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5784
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005785- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5786
5787- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5788
5789- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5790
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005791- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005792
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005793- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5794
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005795New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005796-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005797
5798C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005799-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005800
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005801- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5802 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5803 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5804 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5805 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5806 against buffer overruns.
5807
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005808- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005809 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5810 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005811 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5812 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5813 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5814
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005815- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5816 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5817 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5818 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5819 deprecated.
5820
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005821Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005822-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005823
5824- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5825 relevant is found.
5826
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005827
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005828What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005829===========================
5830
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005831*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5832
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005833Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005834----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005835
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005836- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5837 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5838 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5839 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5840 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5841 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5842 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5843 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005844 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005845 repaired.
5846
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005847- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005848 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005849 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5850 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5851 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5852 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5853 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5854 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5855 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5856 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5857
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005858- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5859 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5860 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5861 leading BMO character).
5862
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005863- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5864 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5865 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5866
5867 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5868 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5869 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005870
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005871 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5872 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5873 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5874 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5875 for various simple to use conversions.
5876
5877 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5878 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5879
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005880 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5881 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5882 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5883 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5884 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5885 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5886 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5887 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5888 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5889 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5890 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5891 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5892 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5893 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5894 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005895
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005896- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5897 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5898 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005899 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005900 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005901
5902 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005903 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5904 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5905 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5906 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5907 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005908 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5909 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005910
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005911 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5912 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5913 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005914 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005915
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005916- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5917 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5918 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5919 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5920 floating arithmetic,
5921
5922 x = 9007199254740992.0
5923 print long(x)
5924
5925 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5926 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5927 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5928 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5929 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5930 functions are of good quality).
5931
5932 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5933 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5934 algorithms to break.
5935
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005936- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5937 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5938 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5939 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5940 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5941 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5942 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5943 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5944 order.
5945
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005946- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5947 operation along the most common code paths.
5948
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005949- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5950 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5951
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005952- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5953 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5954 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5955 {}.update(UserDict())
5956
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005957- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5958 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5959 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5960 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5961 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5962 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5963 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5964 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5965
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005966- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005967 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005968
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005969 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005970 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5971 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005972 join() method of strings
5973 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005974 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5975 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005976 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005977 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005978
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005979- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5980 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5981
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005982- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5983 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5984
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005985- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5986 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5987 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5988 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5989
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005990- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5991 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005992 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005993 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5994 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005995
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005996- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5997
5998
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005999Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006000-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006001
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006002- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006003 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006004 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6005 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6006
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006007- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6008 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6009
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006010- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6011 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6012 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6013 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6014
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006015- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6016 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6017 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6018
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006019- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6020
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006021- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6022
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006023- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6024 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6025 that are still imported into string.py).
6026
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006027- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6028
6029- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6030 Now it does.
6031
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006032- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6033
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006034- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6035 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6036 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6037 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6038 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006039 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6040 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006041
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006042- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6043 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6044 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6045 'help(object)'.
6046
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006047Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006048-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006049
6050- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006051 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006052 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6053 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6054
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006055- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006056 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6057 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006058
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006059C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006060-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006061
6062- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6063 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006064
6065----
6066
6067**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**