blob: a73ac206f93a417dae4aca59b4d9cfd451cfd8ae [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
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000013- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
14 list.sort().
15
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000016- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
17 (2+3) --> (5).
18
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000019- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
20
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000021
22Extension Modules
23-----------------
24
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000025- array.array objects are now picklable.
26
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000027- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
28 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
29
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000030- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
31 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
32 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
33
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000034
35Library
36-------
37
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +000038- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
39 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
40 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
41 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
42
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +000043- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
44
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +000045- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
46 (Bug #951915).
47
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +000048- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
49 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
50 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
51 encoding alias table
52
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +000053- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
54
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000055- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
56 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
57
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +000058- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
59
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +000060- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
61
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +000062- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
63
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +000064- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
65
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +000066- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
67
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +000068- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
69 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
70 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
71
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000072- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000073 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000074
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +000075- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
76 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
77 tokenizer with very long source lines.
78
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +000079- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
80 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
81
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000082
83Build
84-----
85
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +000086- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
87 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
88 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
89 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
90 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
91 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
92 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
93 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
94
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000095
96C API
97-----
98
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +000099- Removed PyRange_New().
100
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000101
102Tests
103-----
104
105
106Mac
107---
108
109
110
111Tools/Demos
112-----------
113
114
115
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000116What's New in Python 2.4 final?
117===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000118
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000119*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000120
121Core and builtins
122-----------------
123
124- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
125 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
126 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
127
128
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000129What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
130==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000131
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000132*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000133
134Core and builtins
135-----------------
136
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000137- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
138 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
139 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
140
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000141
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000142Library
143-------
144
145- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
146 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
147 raised is re-raised.
148
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000149- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
150 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
151
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000152- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
153 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
154 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
155 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
156 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
157 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
158 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
159 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
160 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
161 by the slice are recomputed now.
162
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000163- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000164
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000165Build
166-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000167
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000168- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
169 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
170 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000171
172C API
173-----
174
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000175- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
176
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000177
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000178What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
179================================
180
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000181*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000182
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000183License
184-------
185
186The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
187is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
188changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
189Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
190intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
191durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
192the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
193License::
194
195 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
196
197says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
198to Python 2.1.1.
199
200The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
201License Version 2.
202
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000203Core and builtins
204-----------------
205
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000206- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
207 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
208 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
209 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
210 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
211 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
212 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
213 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
214 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
215 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
216
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000217- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000218
219Extension Modules
220-----------------
221
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000222- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
223 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
224 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
225 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000226
227Library
228-------
229
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000230- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
231 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
232 returned.
233
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000234- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
235
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000236- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
237 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
238
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000239- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
240
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000241- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
242 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000243
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000244- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
245
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000246- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
247
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000248- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000249 the source code is updated and reloaded.
250
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000251Build
252-----
253
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000254- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000255
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000256What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
257================================
258
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000259*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000260
261Core and builtins
262-----------------
263
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000264- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000265 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
266
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000267- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
268 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
269 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
270 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
271
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000272- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
273 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
274
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000275- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
276 constant.
277
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000278- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
279 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
280 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
281 large), and to anomalies such as
282 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
283 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
284 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
285 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000286
287Extension modules
288-----------------
289
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000290- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
291 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000292 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
293 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
294 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000295
296Library
297-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000298
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000299- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000300 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000301 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
302 --swig-cpp.
303
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000304- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
305 it is set.
306
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000307- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000308
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000309- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
310 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
311 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
312 Closes bug #1039270.
313
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000314- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000315
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000316 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000317 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
318 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
319 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
320 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
321 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
322 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
323 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
324 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
325 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
326 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
327 + Updates to documentation.
328
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000329- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
330 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
331 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
332 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
333
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000334- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000335
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000336- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
337 applications should use the getmember function.
338
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000339- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
340
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000341- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
342 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
343 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
344 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
345 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
346 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
347 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
348 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
349 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
350
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000351- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
352 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000353 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000354
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000355- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
356 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
357 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
358 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
359 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
360 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
361 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
362 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000363
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000364- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
365 the new public features (of which there are many).
366
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000367- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000368 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
369 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
370 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
371 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000372 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000373
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000374- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
375
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000376- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
377 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
378 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
379 options.
380
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000381- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
382 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
383 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
384 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
385 conditions under which non-string values work.
386
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000387Build
388-----
389
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000390- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
391 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
392 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
393
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000394- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
395 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
396 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
397 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
398 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000399
400C API
401-----
402
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000403- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
404 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
405
406- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
407
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000408- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
409 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
410 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
411 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
412 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
413 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
414 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
415 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
416 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
417
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000418- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
419
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000420- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
421 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
422 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000423
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000424Tests
425-----
426
427- test__locale ported to unittest
428
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000429Mac
430---
431
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000432- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
433 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
434 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000435
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000436Tools/Demos
437-----------
438
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000439- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
440 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
441 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
442 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
443 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000444
445
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000446What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
447=================================
448
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000449*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000450
451Core and builtins
452-----------------
453
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000454- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000455 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
456
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000457- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
458 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
459 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
460 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
461 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
462 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
463 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
464 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000465 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
466 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
467 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
468 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
469 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000470
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000471- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
472 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
473 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
474 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
475 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
476
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000477- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
478
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000479- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
480 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
481
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000482- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
483 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
484 modified the list.
485
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000486- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
487 functions is now writable.
488
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000489- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
490 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
491 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
492 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
493
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000494- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
495 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
496 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
497 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
498 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000499
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000500- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
501 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
502
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000503Extension modules
504-----------------
505
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000506- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
507
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000508- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
509 data.
510
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000511- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
512 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
513 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
514 supposed to have been truncated away.
515
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000516- Added socket.socketpair().
517
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000518- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
519 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
520
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000521- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000522 versions of Python, have now been removed.
523
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000524Library
525-------
526
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000527- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000528 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000529
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000530- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
531 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
532
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000533- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
534 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
535
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000536- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
537
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000538- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
539 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000540
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000541- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
542 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
543
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000544- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
545
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000546- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
547
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000548- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
549
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000550- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
551 Percivall.
552
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000553- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
554 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
555
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000556- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
557 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
558 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000559 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000560
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000561- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
562 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
563 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
564 and exponent.
565
566- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
567
568- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
569 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
570 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
571
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000572- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
573 to the readline module.
574
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000575- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000576 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
577 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000578
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000579- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
580 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
581 contains symlinks.
582
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000583- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
584 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
585
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000586- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
587 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
588 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
589
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000590- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
591 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
592 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
593 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
594 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
595 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
596 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
597 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
598 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
599 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
600 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
601 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
602 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
603
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000604- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
605
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000606Tools/Demos
607-----------
608
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000609- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
610 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
611
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000612- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
613
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000614Build
615-----
616
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000617- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
618 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
619 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
620 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
621 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
622 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
623 plans to do so.
624
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000625- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
626 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
627
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000628- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
629 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
630
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000631- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
632 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
633
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000634- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
635 GNU/k*BSD systems.
636
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000637- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
638 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
639
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000640C API
641-----
642
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000643..
644
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000645Documentation
646-------------
647
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000648- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
649 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
650
651- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
652 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
653 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000654
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000655New platforms
656-------------
657
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000658- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
659
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000660Tests
661-----
662
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000663..
664
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000665Windows
666-------
667
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000668- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
669 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
670 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
671 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
672 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
673 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
674 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
675 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
676 the problem.
677
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000678Mac
679---
680
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000681..
682
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000683
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000684What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
685=================================
686
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000687*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000688
689Core and builtins
690-----------------
691
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000692- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
693 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
694 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
695 sensitive code.
696
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000697- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000698 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000699
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000700 @staticmethod
701 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000702
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000703 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000704
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000705- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
706 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
707 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
708 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
709 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
710 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
711 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
712 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
713 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
714 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
715 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
716
717 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
718 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
719 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
720 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
721 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
722 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
723 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
724
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000725- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
726 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
727
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000728- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000729 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000730
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000731- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000732 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000733 which was missing for no apparent reason.
734
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000735- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000736 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
737 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
738
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000739- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
740 types that support garbage collection.
741
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000742- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
743
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000744- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
745 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
746 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
747 Jython.
748
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000749- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
750
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000751- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
752 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
753
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000754- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
755 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
756 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000757
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000758- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
759 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
760 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
761
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000762Extension modules
763-----------------
764
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000765- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
766
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000767Library
768-------
769
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000770- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
771 TIS-620
772
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000773- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
774 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
775 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
776 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
777 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
778 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
779 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
780 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
781 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
782 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
783
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000784- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
785
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000786- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
787 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
788 same as when the argument is omitted).
789 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
790
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000791- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
792
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000793- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
794 schemes are offered.
795
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000796- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
797
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000798- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
799 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
800 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
801
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000802- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
803
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000804- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
805 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
806
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000807- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
808 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
809 when dummy_threading is being used.
810
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000811- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
812 from a tarfile.
813
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000814- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000815 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000816
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000817- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
818 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
819 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
820 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
821
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000822- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
823 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
824
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000825- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
826 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
827 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
828 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
829 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
830 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
831 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
832 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
833 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
834 by some other method in progress).
835
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000836- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
837 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
838 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000839
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000840- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
841
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000842- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
843 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
844 AM Kuchling.
845
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000846- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
847 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
848 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
849
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000850- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
851 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
852 instead of unsigned.
853
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000854- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000855 no longer part of the public API.
856
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000857- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
858 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
859 string methods of the same name).
860
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000861- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000862 SF patch 945642.
863
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000864- doctest unittest integration improvements:
865
866 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
867
868 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
869 DocTestSuites.
870
871- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
872 that provide thread-local data.
873
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000874- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
875 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
876
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000877- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
878
879- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
880 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
881 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
882
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000883- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
884
885 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
886 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
887 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000888
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000889 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
890 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
891 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
892 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
893
894 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
895 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
896
897 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
898 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
899 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
900 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
901
902 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
903 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
904 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
905 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
906 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
907
908 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
909 wrapping help output.
910
911 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
912 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
913 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000914
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000915C API
916-----
917
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000918- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
919 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
920 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
921 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
922 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
923 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
924 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
925 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
926 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
927 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
928 its visible semantics have not changed.
929
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000930- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
931 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
932
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000933Documentation
934-------------
935
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000936- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000937
938 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000939 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000940
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000941 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000942
943 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
944
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000945- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000946
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000947Tests
948-----
949
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000950- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000951 platforms that use the Makefile.
952
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000953- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
954 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
955 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
956
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000957
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000958What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
959=================================
960
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000961*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000962
963Core and builtins
964-----------------
965
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000966- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
967 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
968 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
969 objects now (one object instead of three).
970
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000971- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
972 Windows DLLs.
973
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000974- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
975 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000976
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000977- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
978 a new .pyc magic.
979
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000980- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
981 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
982 be there.
983
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000984- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
985 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
986 the LC_NUMERIC category.
987
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000988- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
989 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
990 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
991
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000992- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
993
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000994- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
995 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
996 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000997
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000998- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
999 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1000
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001001- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1002
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001003- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001004 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001005
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001006- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1007
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001008- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1009
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001010- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1011 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1012
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001013- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1014 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1015 Fixes bug #858016 .
1016
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001017- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1018 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1019 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1020
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001021- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1022 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1023 improves their performance (about 35%).
1024
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001025- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1026 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1027 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1028
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001029- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1030 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1031 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1032 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1033
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001034- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1035 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1036 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1037 length is not known).
1038
1039- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1040 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001041 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1042 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001043 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1044
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001045- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1046 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1047
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001048- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1049 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1050 keyword arguments.
1051
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001052- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1053 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1054 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1055
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001056- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1057 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1058 cases.
1059
1060- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1061 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1062 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1063 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1064 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1065 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1066 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1067 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1068 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1069 a release build.
1070
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001071- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1072 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1073
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001074- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001075 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001076
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001077- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1078 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1079 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1080 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1081 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1082 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1083 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1084 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1085 destroyed.
1086
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001087- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1088 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1089 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1090 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1091 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1092 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1093 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1094 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1095
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001096- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1097 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1098 character other than a space.
1099
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001100- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1101 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1102 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1103 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1104 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1105 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1106 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1107 attributes with the same name.
1108
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001109- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1110 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1111 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1112 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1113 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1114 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1115 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1116 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1117 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1118 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1119 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1120 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1121 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1122 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001123
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001124- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1125 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1126 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1127 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1128 This has been repaired.
1129
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001130- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1131
1132- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1133
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001134- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1135 over a sequence.
1136
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001137- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001138 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001139
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001140- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1141
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001142- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1143 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1144 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1145 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1146 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1147 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1148 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1149 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1150
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001151- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1152 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1153 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1154
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001155- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1156 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1157 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1158 freelist.
1159
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001160- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1161 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1162
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001163- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1164 number.
1165
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001166- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1167 a TypeError exception.
1168
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001169- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1170 820195.
1171
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001172- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1173 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1174 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1175
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001176- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001177 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1178 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001179
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001180- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1181 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1182 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1183
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001184- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1185 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001186 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001187
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001188- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001189 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1190 the first call.
1191
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001192
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001193Extension modules
1194-----------------
1195
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001196- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1197 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1198
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001199- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1200 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1201 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1202 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1203 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1204 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1205 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001206
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001207- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1208
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001209- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1210
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001211- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1212 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1213
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001214- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1215 fewer false positives.
1216
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001217- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1218 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1219
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001220- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001221 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1222
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001223- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001224 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001225 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001226 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1227 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001228
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001229- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1230 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1231 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1232 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1233
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001234- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1235 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1236 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1237 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1238 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1239 #897625.
1240
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001241- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1242 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1243
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001244- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1245 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1246 and pops on either side of the deque.
1247
1248- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1249 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1250
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001251- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1252 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1253 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1254 other functions that expect a function argument.
1255
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001256- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1257
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001258- os.getsid was added.
1259
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001260- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1261 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1262 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1263
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001264- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1265
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001266- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1267
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001268- readline.clear_history was added.
1269
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001270- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1271
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001272- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1273
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001274- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1275
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001276- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1277
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001278- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1279
1280- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1281
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001282- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1283
1284- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1285
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001286- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1287 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1288 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1289
1290- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1291 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1292 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1293 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1294 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1295 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1296 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1297
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001298- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1299 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1300 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1301 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001302
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001303- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001304 iterators from a single iterable.
1305
1306- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1307 of raising a TypeError exception.
1308
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001309- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1310 as parameter.
1311
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001312Library
1313-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001314
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001315- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1316 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1317 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001318
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001319- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1320 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1321 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001322
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001323- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001324
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001325- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1326 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001327
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001328- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1329 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1330
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001331- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1332
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001333- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001334 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001335
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001336- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001337 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001338
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001339- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1340
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001341- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1342 on cygwin and mingw32.
1343
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001344- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1345
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001346- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1347 module.
1348
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001349- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1350 installation scheme for all platforms.
1351
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001352- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001353 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001354
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001355- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1356 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1357 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1358
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001359- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1360 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1361 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1362
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001363- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1364
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001365- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1366
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001367- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1368 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1369
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001370- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1371 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1372 type pattern with the same value exists.
1373
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001374- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1375 when run from the command prompt).
1376
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001377- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1378 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1379
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001380- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1381 default sort).
1382
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001383- Added global runctx function to profile module
1384
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001385- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1386
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001387- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1388
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001389- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1390
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001391- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001392 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1393 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1394 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1395 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1396 accordingly.
1397
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001398- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1399 decoding standards.
1400
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001401- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1402 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1403 called for all requests.
1404
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001405- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1406 they are passed to the compiler.
1407
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001408- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1409 indent, width and depth.
1410
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001411- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1412 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1413
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001414- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1415 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1416
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001417- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1418
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001419- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1420
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001421- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1422
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001423- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1424 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1425
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001426- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001427 for better performance.
1428
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001429- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001430
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001431- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1432 a string).
1433
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001434- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1435
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001436- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1437
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001438- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1439
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001440- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1441
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001442- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1443 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1444 list of fieldnames.
1445
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001446- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1447 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1448
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001449- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1450
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001451- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1452 empty lists.
1453
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001454- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1455 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1456 and shelves.
1457
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001458- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1459 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1460
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001461- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001462 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1463 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001464
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001465- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1466 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001467 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001468
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001469- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001470 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1471 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1472
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001473- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1474 and removed in Py2.4.
1475
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001476- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1477
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001478- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1479
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001480Tools/Demos
1481-----------
1482
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001483- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1484 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1485
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001486- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1487
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001488- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1489 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1490 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1491 destination in situations where both files are given.
1492
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001493- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1494 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1495 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1496 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1497
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001498- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1499
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001500- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1501 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1502 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1503 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1504 now.
1505
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001506- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1507 in effect
1508
1509- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1510 C-c C-h
1511
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001512- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1513 -d option was given.
1514
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001515Build
1516-----
1517
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001518- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1519 build under OS X.
1520
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001521- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1522 --enable-profiling.
1523
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001524- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1525 is configured --with-tsc.
1526
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001527- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1528 on AMD64.
1529
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001530- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1531 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1532
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001533- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1534 removed.
1535
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001536- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1537 supported (see PEP 11).
1538
1539- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1540
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001541- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1542
1543- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1544 (see PEP 11).
1545
1546- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1547 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1548
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001549C API
1550-----
1551
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001552- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1553 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1554 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1555
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001556- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1557 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1558 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1559 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1560
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001561- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1562 generator objects.
1563
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001564- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1565 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001566 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1567 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001568
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001569- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1570 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1571
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001572- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1573 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1574 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1575 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1576 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1577
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001578- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1579 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1580 about 10% faster.
1581
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001582- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1583 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1584
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001585- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1586 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1587 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1588 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1589
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001590Windows
1591-------
1592
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001593- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1594 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1595 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1596 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1597
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001598- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1599 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1600 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1601
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001602
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001603What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1604===============================
1605
1606*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1607
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001608IDLE
1609----
1610
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001611- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1612 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1613 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1614 context-menu actions.
1615
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001616- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1617 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1618 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1619 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1620 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1621 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1622 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1623 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1624 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1625
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001626
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001627What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1628=============================================
1629
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001630*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001631
1632Core and builtins
1633-----------------
1634
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001635- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001636 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001637 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1638
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001639Extension modules
1640-----------------
1641
1642- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1643 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1644 than once. This has been fixed.
1645
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001646- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1647 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1648 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1649 call.
1650
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001651- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1652
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001653Library
1654-------
1655
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001656- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1657 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1658
1659- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1660 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1661 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1662 restored.
1663
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001664IDLE
1665----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001666
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001667- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001668
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001669Build
1670-----
1671
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001672- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1673 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1674
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001675C API
1676-----
1677
1678Windows
1679-------
1680
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001681- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1682 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1683
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001684- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1685
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001686Mac
1687---
1688
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001689- Various fixes to pimp.
1690
1691- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1692
1693- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1694 more problems than it solves.
1695
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001696
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001697What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1698=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001699
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001700*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1701
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001702Core and builtins
1703-----------------
1704
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001705- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1706 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1707
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001708- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1709 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001710 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001711
1712- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1713 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1714 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001715 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001716
1717- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1718 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001719
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001720- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1721 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1722 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1723
1724- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001725 770247.
1726
1727- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001728
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001729Extension modules
1730-----------------
1731
1732- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1733 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1734
1735- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1736
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001737- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1738
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001739- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1740 contained within the _strptime module.
1741
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001742- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1743 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1744
1745- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001746 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1747
1748- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1749 the find_class attribute, if present.
1750
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001751- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001752
1753 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1754 (SF bug 763298).
1755
1756 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001757 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1758 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1759 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001760
1761 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1762
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001763Library
1764-------
1765
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001766- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1767
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001768- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1769 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1770 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1771 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1772 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1773 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1774 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1775 or Tester().
1776
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001777- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1778 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1779 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1780 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1781 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1782 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1783 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1784 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1785 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001786
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001787 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001788
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001789- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1790 weren't before was an oversight.
1791
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001792- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1793 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1794
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001795- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1796 when there are no lines.
1797
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001798- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1799 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1800
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001801- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1802 to child processes.
1803
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001804- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1805
1806- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1807
1808- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1809 xmlrpclib.
1810
1811- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1812 responses.
1813
1814- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1815 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1816
1817- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1818 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1819 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1820
1821- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1822 used as patterns.
1823
1824- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1825 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1826 than Tk 8.3.
1827
1828- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1829
1830- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001831
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001832Tools/Demos
1833-----------
1834
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001835- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1836
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001837- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1838
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001839- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001840
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001841Build
1842-----
1843
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001844- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1845
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001846- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1847
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001848- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1849 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001850
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001851- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1852 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1853 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001854
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001855C API
1856-----
1857
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001858- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1859 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1860
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001861Windows
1862-------
1863
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001864- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1865 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1866 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1867 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1868 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1869 Python exception ::
1870
1871 thread.error: can't start new thread
1872
1873 is raised now.
1874
1875- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1876 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1877 instead of from DLL teardown.
1878
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001879Mac
1880---
1881
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001882- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001883 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001884 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1885 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1886 the executable in the bundle.
1887
1888- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001889
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001890- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1891
1892- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1893 on Panther.
1894
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001895What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1896================================
1897
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001898*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001899
1900Core and builtins
1901-----------------
1902
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001903- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1904 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1905 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1906 with the -i option.
1907
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001908- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1909 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1910
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001911- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1912 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1913
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001914- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1915 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1916 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1917 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1918 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1919 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1920 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1921 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1922 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1923 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1924 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1925 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1926 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001927
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001928- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1929 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1930 embedded in a lambda expression.
1931
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001932- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1933 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1934 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1935 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1936 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1937
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001938- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1939 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1940 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1941
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001942- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1943 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1944
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001945- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1946 It's writable again.
1947
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001948- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1949 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1950 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001951 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001952
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001953- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1954 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1955 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1956
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001957Extension modules
1958-----------------
1959
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001960- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1961 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1962
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001963- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1964 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1965 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1966 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1967
1968- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1969 collection.
1970
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001971- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1972 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1973 unique within a single program run.
1974
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001975- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1976 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1977
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001978- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1979 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1980
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001981- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1982 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001983
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001984- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1985
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001986- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1987 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1988
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001989- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1990 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1991 for many BSD-derived systems.
1992
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001993
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001994Library
1995-------
1996
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001997- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1998 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1999 primary ones:
2000
2001 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2002 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2003 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2004
2005 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2006 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2007 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2008 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2009 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2010 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2011
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002012- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2013 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2014 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2015 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2016 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2017 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2018 argument.
2019
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002020- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2021 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2022 in the archive.
2023
2024- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2025 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2026
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002027- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2028 569574).
2029
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002030- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2031 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2032 no more.
2033
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002034- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2035 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2036 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2037 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2038 code coverage.
2039
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002040- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2041 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2042 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002043 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2044 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002045
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002046- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2047 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2048 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002049 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002050
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002051- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2052
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002053- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2054 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2055 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2056 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2057
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002058- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2059 handling.
2060
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002061- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2062 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2063
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002064- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2065 in socket.py.
2066
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002067- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2068
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002069- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2070 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2071 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2072 opener with proxy support.
2073
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002074- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2075
2076- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2077
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002078Tools/Demos
2079-----------
2080
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002081- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2082
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002083- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2084
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002085- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2086 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002087
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002088- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2089 files.
2090
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002091Build
2092-----
2093
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002094- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002095 different root directory.
2096
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002097C API
2098-----
2099
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002100- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2101 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2102 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2103 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2104 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2105 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2106 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2107 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2108 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2109 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2110
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002111- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2112 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2113 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2114 from Python.
2115
2116
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002117New platforms
2118-------------
2119
2120None this time.
2121
2122Tests
2123-----
2124
2125- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2126 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2127
2128Windows
2129-------
2130
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002131- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2132
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002133- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2134 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2135 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2136 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2137 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2138 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2139 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2140 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2141 that's what it's for.
2142
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002143Mac
2144---
2145
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002146- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2147 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2148 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2149 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002150- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2151 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2152- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002153
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002154SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2155------------------------------------
2156
2157430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2158598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2159622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2160661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2161683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2162697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2163713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2164724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2165727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2166729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2167730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2168731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2169732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2170733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2171735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2172740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2173744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2174745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2175747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2176749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2177751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2178753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2179755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2180757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2181760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2182
2183
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002184What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2185================================
2186
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002187*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002188
2189Core and builtins
2190-----------------
2191
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002192- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2193 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2194
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002195- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2196 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2197 and cannot be strings).
2198
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002199- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2200 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2201 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2202 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2203
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002204- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2205 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2206 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2207 Python itself.
2208
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002209- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2210 the referenced object, if it has one.
2211
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002212- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2213 the thread started at
2214 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2215
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002216- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2217 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2218 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2219 placed on a list index.
2220
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002221- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2222 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2223 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2224 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2225
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002226- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2227 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2228 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2229 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2230 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2231 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2232 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2233
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002234- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2235 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2236 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2237 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2238 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2239
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002240- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2241 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002242
2243- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2244 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2245 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2246 #693195.)
2247
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002248- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2249 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002250
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002251- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002252 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002253 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2254 interpreter executions, would fail.
2255
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002256- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002257 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002258 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002259
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002260Extension modules
2261-----------------
2262
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002263- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2264 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2265 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2266 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2267
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002268- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2269 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2270
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002271- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2272 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2273 and Greg Chapman.)
2274
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002275- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2276 recursively.
2277
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002278- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002279 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2280 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2281 leaks.
2282
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002283- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2284
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002285- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2286 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2287 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2288 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2289 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2290 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2291 #705836.
2292
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002293- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002294 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2295
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002296- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2297 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2298 See SF bug #692416.
2299
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002300- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2301 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2302
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002303- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2304 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2305 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002306
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002307- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002308 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2309 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2310
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002311- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2312 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2313 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2314 timeouts to work properly.
2315
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002316Library
2317-------
2318
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002319- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2320 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2321 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2322 future release.
2323
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002324- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2325 for querying platform dependent features.
2326
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002327- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002328
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002329- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2330 pickle protocol versions.
2331
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002332- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2333 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2334 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2335
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002336- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2337
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002338- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2339 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2340 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2341 modules.
2342
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002343- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2344 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2345 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2346
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002347- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2348 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2349
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002350- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2351 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2352 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2353
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002354- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002355 MS Office extensions.
2356
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002357- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2358 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2359
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002360- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2361 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2362
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002363- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2364 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2365 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2366 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2367 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2368 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2369
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002370- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2371 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2372 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002373
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002374- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2375 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2376 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2377
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002378- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2379
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002380- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2381 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2382 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2383
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002384Tools/Demos
2385-----------
2386
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002387- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2388 See the module docstring for details.
2389
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002390Build
2391-----
2392
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002393- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2394 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002395
2396C API
2397-----
2398
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002399- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2400
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002401- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2402 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2403 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2404
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002405- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2406 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002407
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002408 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2409 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2410 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002411
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002412- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002413 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2414
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002415- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2416 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2417 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002418
2419New platforms
2420-------------
2421
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002422None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002423
2424Tests
2425-----
2426
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002427- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2428 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002429
2430Windows
2431-------
2432
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002433- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2434 function.
2435
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002436- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2437 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002438
2439Mac
2440---
2441
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002442- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2443 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002444
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002445- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2446 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002447
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002448- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2449 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2450 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002451
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002452- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002453 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2454 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002455
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002456- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2457 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002458
2459
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002460What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2461=================================
2462
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002463*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002464
2465Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002466-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002467
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002468- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2469 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2470 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2471
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002472- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2473 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2474 (SF patch #664376.)
2475
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002476- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2477 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2478 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2479 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2480 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2481 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002482 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002483
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002484- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2485 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2486 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2487 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002488 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002489
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002490- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2491 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2492 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2493 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2494 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2495 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2496 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2497 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2498 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2499 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2500 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2501
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002502- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2503 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2504 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2505 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2506 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2507 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2508
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002509- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2510 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2511
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002512- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2513 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2514 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2515 case.)
2516
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002517- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2518 passed as unicode strings.
2519
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002520- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2521 See SF bug #683467.
2522
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002523- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2524 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2525
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002526- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2527
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002528- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2529
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002530- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2531 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2532 arguments.
2533
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002534- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2535 See SF bug #667147.
2536
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002537- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002538 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002539 See SF bug #676155.
2540
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002541- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002542 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002543 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2544 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2545 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2546 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2547 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2548 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002549
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002550Extension modules
2551-----------------
2552
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002553- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2554 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2555 tp_as_number pointer.
2556
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002557- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2558 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2559 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2560 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2561 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2562
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002563- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2564
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002565- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2566
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002567- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002568 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002569 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2570 patch #678531.)
2571
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002572- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2573 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2574
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002575- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2576 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2577
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002578- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2579
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002580- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2581 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2582 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2583
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002584- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2585
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002586- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2587 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2588
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002589- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002590
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002591- datetime changes:
2592
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002593 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2594
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002595 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2596 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2597 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2598 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2599 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2600 now.
2601
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002602 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002603 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2604 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002605
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002606 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002607 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002608 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2609 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2610 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2611 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002612
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002613 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2614 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2615 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002616 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2617
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002618 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2619 by a later example coded by Guido.
2620
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002621 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002622 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2623 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2624 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002625 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2626 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2627
2628 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2629 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2630 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2631 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2632 tzinfo subclass instance.
2633
2634 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2635 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2636 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2637 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2638 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2639 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2640 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2641 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002642
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002643 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2644 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2645 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2646 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2647 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002648 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2649
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002650 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002651
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002652 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2653 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2654 as a naive datetime object.
2655
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002656 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2657 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2658 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2659
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002660 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2661 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2662 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2663 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2664 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2665 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2666 comparison.
2667
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002668 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2669 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2670 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2671 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002672 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002673
2674 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002675
2676 and ::
2677
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002678 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2679
2680 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2681 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2682 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2683 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2684
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002685 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2686 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2687 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2688 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2689 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2690
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002691 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2692 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002693 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2694 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002695
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002696Library
2697-------
2698
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002699- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2700 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2701
2702- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2703 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2704 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2705 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2706 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2707 See PEP 307 for details.
2708
2709- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2710 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2711
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002712- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2713 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002714 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002715 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2716 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002717 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002718
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002719- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2720 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2721
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002722- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2723 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2724 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2725
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002726- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2727
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002728- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2729 exception.
2730
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002731- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2732 class.
2733
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002734- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2735 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2736 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2737
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002738- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2739 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2740
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002741- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002742 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2743 See SF bug #659228.
2744
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002745- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2746 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2747 See SF patch #651082.
2748
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002749- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002750
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002751- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2752 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2753
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002754- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002755 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002756
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002757- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2758 DOS paths from other platforms.
2759
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002760Tools/Demos
2761-----------
2762
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002763- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2764 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2765 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2766 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2767 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2768 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2769 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2770 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2771 example:
2772
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002773 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2774 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002775
2776 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2777
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002778
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002779Build
2780-----
2781
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002782- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2783 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2784 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002785 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2786
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002787 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2788
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002789- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2790 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2791 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2792 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2793 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2794 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2795 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2796 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2797 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2798
2799- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2800 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2801 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2802 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2803
2804- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2805 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2806
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002807C API
2808-----
2809
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002810- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2811 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002812
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002813- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2814 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2815 tp_as_number pointer.
2816
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002817- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2818 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2819 (SF #681367)
2820
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002821- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2822 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2823 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2824 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002825
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002826Tests
2827-----
2828
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002829- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002830 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2831 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2832 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2833 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2834 pydoc.)
2835
2836- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2837
2838- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002839
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002840Windows
2841-------
2842
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002843- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2844 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2845 time).
2846
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002847- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2848 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2849
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002850- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2851 release without strong cryptography.
2852
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002853- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002854 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002855
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002856- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2857 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2858
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002859Mac
2860---
2861
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002862- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2863 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002864
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002865- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2866 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2867 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002868
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002869- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2870 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002871
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002872- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2873 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2874 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2875 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002876
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002877- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002878 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2879 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2880 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002881
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002882
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002883What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002884=================================
2885
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002886*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002887
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002888Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002889--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002890
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002891- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2892
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002893- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2894 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002895 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002896 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002897 a different meaning than before.
2898
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002899- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002900 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002901 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002902
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002903- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002904 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002905 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002906
2907- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2908 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2909 and deallocation.
2910
2911- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2912 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2913
2914- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2915 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2916 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2917 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2918 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2919
2920- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2921 now detected by the garbage collector.
2922
2923- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2924 [SF bug 519621]
2925
2926- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2927 identifier.
2928
2929- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2930 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2931 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2932 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2933 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2934 [SF bug 563060]
2935
2936- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2937 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2938 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2939 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2940 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2941
2942- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2943 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2944 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2945
2946- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2947
2948- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2949 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2950 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2951 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2952 state of the slots would be lost.)
2953
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002954Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002955-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002956
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002957- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002958 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2959 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2960 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2961 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002962 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2963 Jython 2.1.
2964
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002965- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002966 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002967 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2968 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2969 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2970 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2971 these, see PEP 302.
2972
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002973- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2974 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2975 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2976
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002977- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2978 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2979 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2980
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002981- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2982 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2983 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2984
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002985- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2986 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2987 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2988 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2989 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2990 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2991 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2992 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2993 releases or implementations.
2994
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002995- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002996 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2997 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002998
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002999- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3000 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3001
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003002- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3003 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3004 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3005
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003006- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3007 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3008
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003009- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3010 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003011 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3012 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003013
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003014- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3015 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3016 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3017 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3018 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3019
3020 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3021 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3022 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3023 pattern.
3024
3025 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3026 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3027 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3028 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3029
3030 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3031 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3032 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3033 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3034 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3035 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3036
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003037- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3038 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3039 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3040 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3041 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3042 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3043 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3044 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003045
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003046- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3047 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3048 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3049 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3050 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003051 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3052 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3053 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3054 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3055 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3056 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3057 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003058
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003059- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3060 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3061
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003062- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3063 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3064 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3065 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3066 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3067 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3068 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3069 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3070 to Zack Weinberg!
3071
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003072- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3073 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3074 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3075 type. This has been fixed now.
3076
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003077- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3078 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3079 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3080
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003081- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3082 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3083 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3084 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3085 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3086 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3087 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3088 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003089 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003090
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003091- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3092 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3093 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003094
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003095- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3096 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3097 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3098 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3099 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3100 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3101 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3102 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003103 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003104 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3105 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3106
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003107- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3108 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3109 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3110 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3111 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3112 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3113 this.)
3114
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003115- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3116 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003117 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003118 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003119 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3120 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003121 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3122 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003123
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003124- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3125 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3126 currently running.
3127
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003128- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3129 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3130 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3131 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3132
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003133- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3134 as directory names.
3135
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003136- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3137 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3138
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003139- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3140 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3141
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003142- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003143 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3144 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003145
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003146- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3147 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3148 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3149 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3150 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3151
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003152- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3153 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3154 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3155 removed.
3156
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003157- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3158 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3159 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3160
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003161- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3162 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3163 to __debug__.
3164
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003165- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3166 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3167 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3168
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003169- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3170 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3171 deprecated now.
3172
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003173- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3174 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3175 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003176
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003177- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3178 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3179 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3180 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3181 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003182
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003183- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3184 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3185
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003186- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3187 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3188 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003189 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003190 is backward compatible.
3191
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003192- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3193 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3194 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3195 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3196 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3197
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003198- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3199 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3200 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3201 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3202 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3203 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003204
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003205- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3206 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3207
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003208- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3209 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3210
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003211- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3212 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3213 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3214 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3215 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3216
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003217- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3218 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3219 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3220
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003221- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003222 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3223
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003224- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3225 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3226 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003227
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003228- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3229 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3230
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003231- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3232 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3233 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3234
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003235- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3236
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003237Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003238-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003239
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003240- Added three operators to the operator module:
3241 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3242 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3243 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3244
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003245- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3246
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003247- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3248 archives.
3249
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003250- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3251 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3252 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3253
3254 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3255
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003256- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3257 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3258 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003259 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003260
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003261- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3262 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3263 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3264 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003265 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3266 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3267 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3268 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003269
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003270- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3271 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003272
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003273- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3274
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003275- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3276 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3277
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003278- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3279 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3280 supported.
3281
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003282- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3283
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003284- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3285 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003286
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003287- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3288 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3289
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003290- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3291
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003292- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3293 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3294
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003295- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3296 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3297 functions but callable type objects.
3298
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003299- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003300 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003301 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003302
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003303- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3304 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003305
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003306- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3307 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003308
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003309- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3310 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3311 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3312 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3313
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003314- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3315 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003316
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003317- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3318 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3319 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3320 and __imul__.
3321
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003322- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003323 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3324 is called.
3325
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003326- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3327 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3328 interpreter was compiled.
3329
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003330- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3331 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3332 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003333 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003334 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3335 1, not 2.
3336
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003337- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3338 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3339 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3340 limit.
3341
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003342- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3343 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3344 bug #623464.
3345
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003346- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3347 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3348 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3349 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3350
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003351Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003352-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003353
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003354- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3355
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003356- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3357 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3358 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3359 with Python 2.3a2.
3360
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003361- os.path exposes getctime.
3362
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003363- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003364 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003365 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003366 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003367 unit tests of floating point results.
3368
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003369- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3370 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3371 has been increased.
3372
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003373- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3374 executed.
3375
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003376- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3377 postinstallation script.
3378
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003379- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3380 test the current module.
3381
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003382- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003383 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3384 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3385 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3386 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3387
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003388- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003389 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003390 Ward's Optik package.
3391
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003392- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3393 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3394 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3395 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3396
3397- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3398 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003399 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003400
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003401- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3402 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3403 shelf are binary pickles.
3404
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003405- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3406 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3407
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003408- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3409 modules are iterators now.
3410
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003411- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3412 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3413 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3414 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3415 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3416 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003417
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003418- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3419 with their entity value.
3420
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003421- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3422
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003423- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3424 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003425
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003426- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3427 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003428 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003429
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003430- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3431 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3432 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3433 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3434 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3435 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3436 main():
3437
3438 import locale
3439 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3440
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003441- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3442 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3443
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003444- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3445 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3446 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3447 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3448 to the new standard.
3449
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003450- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3451 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3452 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3453 an extension to the database.
3454
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003455- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3456 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3457 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3458 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003459 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003460
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003461- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003462 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003463
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003464- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3465 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3466 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3467 bounded integers.
3468
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003469- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3470 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3471 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3472 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3473 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3474 in existence.
3475
3476 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3477 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3478 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3479 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3480 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3481 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3482
3483 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3484 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3485 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3486 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3487
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003488- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3489 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3490 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3491
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003492- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3493
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003494- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3495 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3496 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3497 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3498
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003499- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3500 argument.
3501
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003502- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3503 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3504 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3505 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3506 [SF patch 560794].
3507
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003508- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3509 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3510 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003511 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3512 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3513 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003514
3515- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3516 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003517
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003518- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3519 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3520 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3521 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003522
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003523- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3524 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3525 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3526 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3527 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3528
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003529- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003530
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003531- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3532
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003533- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3534 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3535 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3536 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3537 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3538 identical to None.
3539
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003540- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3541 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3542 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3543 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3544 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3545 results now.
3546
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003547- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3548 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3549
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003550- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3551 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3552 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3553 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3554 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3555 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3556 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3557 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3558
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003559- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3560
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003561- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3562 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3563
3564- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3565 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3566 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3567 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3568 and other systems.
3569
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003570- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3571 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3572 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3573 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 +00003574 work well with these.
3575
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003576- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3577
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003578- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003579 connections.
3580
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003581- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3582 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3583 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3584
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003585- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3586 sets
3587
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003588- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3589 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3590 name.
3591
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003592- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3593 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3594 passed in.
3595
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003596- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003597 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003598 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3599 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003600
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003601- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3602
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003603- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3604
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003605- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3606 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3607 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3608
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003609- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3610 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3611 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3612 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003613 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003614
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003615- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003616 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003617 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003618
3619- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3620 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3621 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3622
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003623- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003624 the value of its expression argument.
3625
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003626- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3627 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3628 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3629
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003630- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3631 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3632 skipstone browser was included.
3633
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003634- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3635 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3636
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003637Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003638-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003639
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003640- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3641 names in addition to accepting file names.
3642
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003643- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3644 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3645 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3646 still used and useful.)
3647
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003648- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3649 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3650 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3651 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003652
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003653- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3654 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3655 the generated binary.
3656
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003657Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003658-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003659
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003660- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3661
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003662- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3663 except in the hands of experts.
3664
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003665- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003666 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3667 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3668 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003669
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003670- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3671 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3672 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3673 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3674 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3675 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3676 builds.
3677
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003678- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3679 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3680 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3681 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3682 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3683 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3684 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3685 new type.
3686
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003687- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003688
3689 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3690 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3691 positive infinities.
3692
3693 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3694 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3695 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3696 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3697 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3698 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3699 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3700
3701 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3702
3703 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3704
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003705- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3706 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3707 size of the executable.
3708
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003709- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3710 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3711 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3712 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003713
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003714- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3715
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003716- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3717 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3718 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003719
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003720- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3721 well as Unix.
3722
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003723- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3724 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3725 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3726 modules in the README file for details.
3727
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003728C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003729-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003730
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003731- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3732 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003733 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003734 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003735 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003736
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003737- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3738 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3739 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3740 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3741 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3742 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003743 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003744 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3745 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3746 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3747 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3748 aligned.)
3749
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003750- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3751 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3752 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3753
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003754- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3755 level.
3756
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003757- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3758 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3759 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3760 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3761 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3762
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003763- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3764 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3765 code.
3766
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003767- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3768 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3769 adjusting for negative indices.
3770
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003771- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3772 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3773 object.
3774
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003775- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3776 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3777 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3778
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003779- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3780 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003781
3782- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3783
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003784- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3785 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3786 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3787 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3788
3789- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3790
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003791- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003792
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003793- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003794 without going through the buffer API.
3795
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003796- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003797
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003798- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3799 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3800 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3801 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3802
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003803- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3804 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3805
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003806- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003807 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3808
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003809New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003810-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003811
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003812- OpenVMS is now supported.
3813
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003814- AtheOS is now supported.
3815
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003816- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3817
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003818- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3819
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003820Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003821-----
3822
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003823- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3824 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3825 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003826
3827Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003828-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003829
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003830- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3831 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3832 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3833 bugs.
3834 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003835 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003836 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3837 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003838 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003839
3840- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003841 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003842
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003843- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3844 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3845
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003846- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3847 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003848 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003849 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3850
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003851- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3852 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3853 use files" uninstall option).
3854
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003855- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3856
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003857- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3858 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3859
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003860- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3861 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3862 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3863
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003864- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3865 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3866 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3867 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3868 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003869 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3870 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3871 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003872
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003873- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003874 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003875 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3876 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3877 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3878 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3879 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3880 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3881 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3882 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3883 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3884 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3885 work around.
3886
3887- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3888 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3889 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3890 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3891 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3892 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3893 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3894 specified with O_CREAT too).
3895
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003896Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003897----
3898
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003899- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003900
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003901- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3902 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3903 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3904
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003905- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3906 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3907 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3908
3909- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3910 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3911 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3912 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3913 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3914 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3915 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3916 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003917
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003918- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3919 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3920 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003921
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003922- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3923 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3924 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3925 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3926 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003927
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003928- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3929 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3930 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003931
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003932- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3933 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003934
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003935- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3936 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3937 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3938 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3939 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003940
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003941- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3942 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3943 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3944
3945- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3946 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3947 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003948
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003949- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3950 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3951 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3952 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003953 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003954
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003955- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3956 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003957
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003958- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3959 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003960
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003961- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003962 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003963 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3964 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003965
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003966
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003967What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003968===============================
3969
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003970*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3971
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003972Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003973--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003974
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003975- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3976 with a custom metaclass.
3977
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003978Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003979-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003980
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003981- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3982 are proxies.
3983
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003984Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003985-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003986
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003987- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3988 very short strings.
3989
3990- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3991 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3992 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3993 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3994 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3995
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003996Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003997-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003998
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003999- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4000 close or delete time).
4001
4002- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4003 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4004
4005- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4006
4007- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004008 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004009
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004010Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004011-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004012
4013Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004014-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004015
4016C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004017-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004018
4019New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004020-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004021
4022Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004023-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004024
4025Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004026-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004027
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004028- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4029
4030- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4031 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4032
4033- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4034 deleted at process exit time.
4035
4036- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4037 in backslash.
4038
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004039Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004040----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004041
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004042- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4043 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4044 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4045
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004046
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004047What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004048===========================
4049
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004050*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4051
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004052Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004053--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004054
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004055- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4056 been extensively updated. See
4057
4058 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4059
4060 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4061
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004062- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4063 deleted!
4064
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004065- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4066 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4067 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4068 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4069 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4070
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004071- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4072
4073 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4074 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4075
4076 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4077 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4078 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4079 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4080 supported anyway.
4081
4082 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4083 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4084
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004085- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4086 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4087 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4088 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4089 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004090
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004091- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4092 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4093 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4094
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004095Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004096-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004097
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004098- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4099 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4100 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4101 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4102 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4103 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004104 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4105 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4106 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4107 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004108
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004109- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4110 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4111 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4112
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004113Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004114-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004115
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004116- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4117
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004118Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004119-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004120
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004121- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4122 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4123 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4124 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4125 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4126 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4127
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004128- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4129
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004130- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4131
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004132- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4133
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004134- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4135 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4136 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4137
4138- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4139
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004140Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004141-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004142
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004143- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4144 off a search on Google.
4145
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004146Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004147-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004148
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004149- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4150 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4151 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4152 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4153 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4154 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4155 other platforms should do likewise.
4156
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004157- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4158 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4159 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4160
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004161C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004162-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004163
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004164- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4165 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4166 producing key-value pairs.
4167
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004168- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004169 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004170 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4171 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4172 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4173 previously went unchallenged.
4174
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004175New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004176-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004177
4178Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004179-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004180
4181Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004182-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004183
4184Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004185----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004186
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004187- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4188 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004189
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004190- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4191 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4192 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4193 home.
4194
4195
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004196What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004197===========================
4198
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004199*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4200
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004201Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004202--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004203
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004204- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4205 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004206
4207 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004208 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004209
4210 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4211 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004212 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004213 This needs to be documented.
4214
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004215- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4216 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4217
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004218- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4219 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4220 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4221
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004222- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4223 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4224
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004225- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4226 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4227 class forbids it).
4228
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004229- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4230 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4231 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4232
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004233- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4234
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004235Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004236-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004237
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004238- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4239 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004240 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004241
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004242- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4243 (like 1 + '').
4244
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004245Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004246-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004247
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004248- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4249 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4250 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4251 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004252 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004253 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4254
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004255- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4256 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4257 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4258 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4259
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004260- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4261 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004262 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4263 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4264 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004265
4266- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4267 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004268
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004269- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4270 bytes on its input.
4271
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004272Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004273-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004274
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004275- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004276 convenience function.
4277
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004278- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4279 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4280 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004281 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4282 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4283 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4284 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4285 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4286 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004287
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004288- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4289 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4290 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4291 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4292
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004293- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4294 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4295 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4296
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004297- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4298 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4299 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4300 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4301
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004302- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4303 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004304 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004305 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4306 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4307 new -l and -e options.
4308
4309- statcache is now deprecated.
4310
4311- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4312 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004313 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004314 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4315 time properly taken into account.
4316
4317- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4318 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4319 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4320 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4321
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004322Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004323-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004324
4325Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004326-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004327
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004328- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4329 is built with libdb3 if available.
4330
4331- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4332
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004333C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004334-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004335
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004336- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4337 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4338 PySequence_Size().
4339
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004340- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4341
4342- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4343 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4344 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4345
4346- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4347 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4348
4349- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4350 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4351
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004352New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004353-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004354
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004355- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4356 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4357
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004358- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4359 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4360
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004361- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4362
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004363Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004364-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004365
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004366- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4367 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4368
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004369Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004370-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004371
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004372Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004373----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004374
4375- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4376 removed completely in the next release.
4377
4378- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4379 OSX.
4380
4381- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4382 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4383
4384- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4385
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004386
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004387What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004388===========================
4389
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004390*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4391
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004392Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004393--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004394
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004395- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004396 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004397 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004398 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4399 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004400 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4401 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004402 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4403 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004404
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004405- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4406 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4407
4408- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4409 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4410
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004411Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004412-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004413
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004414- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4415 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4416 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4417 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4418 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4419 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4420 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4421 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4422
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004423- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4424 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4425 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4426 example).
4427
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004428- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004429 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004430 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004431 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004432
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004433- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4434 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4435 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004436 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004437
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004438- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4439 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4440 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4441 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4442 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4443 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4444
4445 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4446
4447 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4448
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004449Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004450-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004451
4452- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4453
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004454- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4455
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004456- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4457 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004458
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004459- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4460 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4461 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4462 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4463 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4464 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004465 attributes.
4466
4467- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4468 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4469 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004470
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004471- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4472 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4473 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004474
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004475- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4476 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4477 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004478 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4479 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4480
4481- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4482 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004483
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004484Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004485-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004486
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004487- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4488 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4489
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004490- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4491 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4492 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4493 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4494
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004495- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4496 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4497 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4498 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4499
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004500 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4501 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4502 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4503 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4504 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4505 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4506 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4507 without losing information).
4508
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004509- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004510 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4511 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4512 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4513 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4514 module).
4515
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004516 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004517 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4518 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4519 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4520 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004521
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004522- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004523 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4524 encoding.
4525
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004526- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4527 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4528
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004529- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004530 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4531
4532- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4533 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4534 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4535 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4536
4537- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4538
4539- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4540 ON, and OFF.
4541
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004542- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4543 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4544
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004545Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004546-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004547
4548- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4549 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4550 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004551
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004552- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4553 been added: -X and -E.
4554
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004555Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004556-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004557
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004558- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4559 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4560
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004561C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004562-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004563
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004564- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4565 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4566 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4567 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4568 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4569
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004570- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4571 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4572 as long) arguments.
4573
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004574- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4575 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4576 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4577 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4578 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4579 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4580
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004581- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4582 input.
4583
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004584New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004585-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004586
4587Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004588-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004589
4590Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004591-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004592
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004593- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4594 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4595 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4596
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004597- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4598 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4599 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004600 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004601
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004602 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4603 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4604 import signal
4605 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004606
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004607 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004608 while 1:
4609 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004610 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004611 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4612 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4613 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4614 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004615
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004616
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004617What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4618===========================
4619
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004620*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4621
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004622Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004623--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004624
4625- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4626 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4627 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4628
4629- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4630 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4631 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4632 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4633 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4634 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4635 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004636
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004637- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004638 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004639 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4640 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4641 associate a docstring with a property.
4642
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004643- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4644 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4645 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4646 other built-in object types.
4647
4648- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4649 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4650 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4651 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4652 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4653
4654- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4655 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4656
4657- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4658 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004659 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004660 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4661 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4662 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4663 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4664 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4665
4666- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4667 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4668 class.
4669
4670- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4671 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4672 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4673 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4674
4675- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4676 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4677 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4678 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4679
4680- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4681 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4682
4683- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4684 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4685 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4686 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4687 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004688 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004689 with the same value as s.
4690
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004691- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4692
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004693Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004694----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004695
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004696- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4697
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004698- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4699 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4700 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4701 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4702 objects.
4703
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004704- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4705 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004706 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4707 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4708
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004709- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4710 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4711 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4712
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004713Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004714-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004715
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004716- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4717 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4718 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4719 by the instances.
4720
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004721- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4722 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4723 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4724
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004725- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4726 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4727 before the entire comparison is complete.
4728
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004729- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4730 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4731 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4732
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004733- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4734 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4735 getwriter().
4736
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004737- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4738 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4739
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004740- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004741 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4742 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4743
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004744- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4745 iterable object.
4746
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004747- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4748 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004749
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004750- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4751 authentication.
4752
4753- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4754 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004755
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004756- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004757 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4758 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4759 a sample driver.)
4760
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004761Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004762-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004763
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004764- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4765 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4766 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4767 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4768 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4769 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4770 kernel has large file support.
4771
4772- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4773 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4774 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4775 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4776 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4777
4778- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4779 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4780 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4781
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004782C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004783-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004784
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004785- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4786 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4787
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004788New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004789-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004790
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004791- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4792 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4793
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004794Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004795-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004796
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004797- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4798 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4799 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4800 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4801 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4802
4803- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4804 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4805 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4806 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4807
4808- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4809 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4810
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004811Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004812-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004813
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004814- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004815 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4816 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004817
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004818
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004819What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4820===========================
4821
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004822*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4823
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004824Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004825----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004826
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004827- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4828 big to represent as a C double.
4829
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004830- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4831 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4832 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4833 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4834 restriction).
4835
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004836- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4837 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4838 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4839 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4840 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4841
4842 >>> dir([])
4843 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4844 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4845 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4846 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4847 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4848 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4849 'reverse', 'sort']
4850
4851 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4852
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004853- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004854 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4855 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4856 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4857 OverflowError exception.
4858
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004859- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004860 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004861 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4862 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4863 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4864 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4865 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004866 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004867 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4868 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4869
4870 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4871 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4872 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4873 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004874
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004875- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004876 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4877 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4878 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4879 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4880 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4881 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4882 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4883 once it is created.
4884
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004885- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4886 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4887 (key, value) pairs.
4888
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004889- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004890 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4891 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4892
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004893- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4894 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4895 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4896 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4897 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004898
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004899- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004900 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4901 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4902
4903 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4904
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004905- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004906 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4907
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004908Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004909-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004910
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004911- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004912 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4913 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004914
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004915- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4916 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4917 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4918 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4919 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4920 in this area anymore).
4921
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004922- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4923 threading.Timer.
4924
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004925- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4926 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4927
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004928- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004929 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4930
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004931- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004932 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4933 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4934 converted to Python longs.
4935
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004936- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004937 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4938
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004939- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4940 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4941 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4942
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004943Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004944-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004945
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004946- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4947 division operators as per PEP 238.
4948
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004949Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004950-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004951
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004952- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4953 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4954 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4955 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4956
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004957C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004958-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004959
4960- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004961
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004962- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4963 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004964 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004965
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004966 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4967 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004968 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004969 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004970
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004971- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004972 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4973 module:
4974
4975 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004976
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004977 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4978 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004979
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004980 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4981 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004982
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004983 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4984
4985 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4986
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004987- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004988 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4989 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4990 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004991
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004992New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004993-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004994
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004995- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4996 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4997 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4998 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4999 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005000
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005001Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005002-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005003
5004Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005005-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005006
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005007- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5008 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5009 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5010 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005011 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5012 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5013 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5014 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5015 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005016
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005017- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005018 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5019
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005020
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005021What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5022===========================
5023
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005024*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5025
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005026Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005027-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005028
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005029- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5030 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5031
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005032- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5033 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5034 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005035
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005036- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5037 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5038 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5039 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005040
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005041- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5042
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005043- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005044
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005045Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005046-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005047
5048- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005049 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005050 the module docstring for details.
5051
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005052Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005053-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005054
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005055- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005056 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5057 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5058 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005059
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005060- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5061 Nick Mathewson.
5062
5063Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005064----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005065
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005066- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5067 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5068 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5069 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5070 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5071 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5072 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5073 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5074
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005075- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5076 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5077 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5078 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5079
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005080- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5081 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5082 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5083 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5084 come a long way).
5085
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005086- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5087 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5088 write filters for these warnings).
5089
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005090- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5091 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5092 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5093 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5094 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5095
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005096- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5097 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5098 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5099 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5100 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5101 older distribution.
5102
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005103Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005104-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005105
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005106- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5107 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005108 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005109
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005110- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5111 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5112 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5113
5114- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5115
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005116- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5117
5118- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5119
5120- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5121
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005122- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005123
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005124- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5125
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005126New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005127-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005128
5129C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005130-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005131
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005132- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5133 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5134 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5135 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5136 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5137 against buffer overruns.
5138
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005139- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005140 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5141 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005142 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5143 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5144 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5145
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005146- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5147 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5148 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5149 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5150 deprecated.
5151
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005152Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005153-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005154
5155- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5156 relevant is found.
5157
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005158
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005159What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005160===========================
5161
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005162*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5163
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005164Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005165----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005166
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005167- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5168 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5169 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5170 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5171 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5172 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5173 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5174 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005175 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005176 repaired.
5177
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005178- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005179 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005180 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5181 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5182 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5183 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5184 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5185 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5186 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5187 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5188
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005189- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5190 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5191 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5192 leading BMO character).
5193
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005194- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5195 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5196 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5197
5198 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5199 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5200 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005201
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005202 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5203 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5204 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5205 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5206 for various simple to use conversions.
5207
5208 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5209 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5210
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005211 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5212 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5213 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5214 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5215 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5216 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5217 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5218 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5219 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5220 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5221 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5222 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5223 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5224 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5225 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005226
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005227- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5228 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5229 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005230 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005231 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005232
5233 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005234 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5235 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5236 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5237 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5238 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005239 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5240 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005241
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005242 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5243 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5244 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005245 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005246
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005247- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5248 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5249 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5250 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5251 floating arithmetic,
5252
5253 x = 9007199254740992.0
5254 print long(x)
5255
5256 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5257 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5258 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5259 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5260 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5261 functions are of good quality).
5262
5263 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5264 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5265 algorithms to break.
5266
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005267- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5268 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5269 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5270 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5271 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5272 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5273 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5274 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5275 order.
5276
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005277- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5278 operation along the most common code paths.
5279
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005280- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5281 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5282
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005283- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5284 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5285 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5286 {}.update(UserDict())
5287
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005288- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5289 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5290 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5291 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5292 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5293 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5294 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5295 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5296
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005297- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005298 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005299
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005300 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005301 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5302 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005303 join() method of strings
5304 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005305 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5306 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005307 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005308 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005309
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005310- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5311 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5312
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005313- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5314 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5315
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005316- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5317 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5318 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5319 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5320
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005321- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5322 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005323 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005324 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5325 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005326
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005327- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5328
5329
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005330Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005331-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005332
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005333- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005334 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005335 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5336 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5337
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005338- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5339 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5340
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005341- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5342 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5343 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5344 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5345
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005346- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5347 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5348 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5349
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005350- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5351
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005352- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5353
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005354- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5355 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5356 that are still imported into string.py).
5357
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005358- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5359
5360- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5361 Now it does.
5362
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005363- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5364
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005365- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5366 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5367 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5368 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5369 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005370 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5371 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005372
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005373- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5374 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5375 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5376 'help(object)'.
5377
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005378Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005379-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005380
5381- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005382 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005383 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5384 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5385
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005386- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005387 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5388 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005389
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005390C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005391-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005392
5393- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5394 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005395
5396----
5397
5398**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**