blob: 7c7c51dbbe359cd91946932984951e3242fa25bc [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000015- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
16 reference counts in some error exit cases.
17
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000018- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
19 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
20 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
21 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
22 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
23 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
24 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
25 realloc.
26
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000027- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
28 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
29
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000030- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
31 like their int counterparts.
32
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000033- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
34 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
35 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
36 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
37 for a longer write-up of the problem).
38
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000039- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
40 serializing floats.
41
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000042- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
43 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
44 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
45
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000046- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
47 278.
48
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000049- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
50 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
51 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
52 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
53 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
54 PyNumber_*().
55 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
56
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000057- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
58 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
59 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
60 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
61
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000062- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
63 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
64 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
65 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
66 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
67
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000068- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
69 disabled caused a crash.
70
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000071- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
72 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
73
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000074- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000075 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
76
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000077- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
78
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000079- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000080 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
81 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
82 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000083
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000084- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
85
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000086- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
87 returning None.
88
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000089- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000090 ('\') with a specific error message.
91
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000092- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
93
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000094- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
95 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
96
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000097- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000098 an ferror() call.
99
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000100- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
101 list.sort().
102
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000103- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
104 (2+3) --> (5).
105
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000106- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
107
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000108- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
109 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000110
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000111- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
112 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
113 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
114
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000115Extension Modules
116-----------------
117
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000118- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000119 implemented treated all integer values except 1 as false.
120
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000121- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
122
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000123- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
124 if available on the platform.
125
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000126- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
127 available on the platform.
128
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000129- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
130 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
131
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000132- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
133
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000134- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
135 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
136 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
137
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000138- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
139
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000140- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
141 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
142
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000143- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000144 file size.
145
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000146- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
147
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000148- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
149 {remove_history,replace_history}
150
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000151- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
152 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000153
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000154- stat_float_times is now True.
155
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000156- array.array objects are now picklable.
157
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000158- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
159 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
160
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000161- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
162 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
163 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
164
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000165- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
166 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000167
168Library
169-------
170
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000171- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
172 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
173
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000174- textwrap now processes text chucks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
175 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
176
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000177- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
178 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
179
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000180- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
181 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
182
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000183- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
184 though this can be missing in embedded interpreters
185
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000186- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
187
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000188- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
189 error messages.
190
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000191- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
192
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000193- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
194 Bug #1224621.
195
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000196- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
197 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
198 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
199 terminates by raising StopIteration.
200
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000201- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
202
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000203- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
204 component of the path.
205
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000206- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
207 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
208 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
209 class at all.
210
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000211- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
212 files to PyPI.
213
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000214- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
215 them to PyPI.
216
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000217- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
218 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
219 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
220 work as expected.
221
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000222- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
223 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
224
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000225- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000226 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
227
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000228- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
229
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000230- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
231 to build.
232
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000233- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
234 symbolic links on Windows.
235
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000236- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000237 profile.py if available.
238
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000239- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
240
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000241- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
242 in LWPCookieJar.
243
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000244- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
245
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000246- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
247
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000248- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
249
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000250- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
251
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000252- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
253
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000254- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
255
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000256- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
257
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000258- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
259
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000260- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
261 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
262 be exploited in various ways.
263
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000264- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
265
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000266- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
267
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000268- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
269
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000270- Enhancements to the csv module:
271
272 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
273 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000274 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000275 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
276 reporting.
277 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
278 dictates.
279 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000280 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000281 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000282 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
283 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000284 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
285 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000286 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000287 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
288 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
289 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
290 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
291 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
292 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
293 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
294 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
295 without first creating a dialect class.
296 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
297 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
298 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000299 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000300 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
301 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000302 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
303 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
304 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
305 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000306 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
307 This has been fixed.
308
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000309- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
310 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
311 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
312 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
313
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000314- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
315
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000316- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
317 (Bug #951915).
318
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000319- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
320 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
321 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
322 encoding alias table
323
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000324- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
325
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000326- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
327 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
328
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000329- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
330
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000331- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
332
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000333- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
334
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000335- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
336
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000337- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
338
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000339- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
340 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
341 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
342
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000343- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000344 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000345
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000346- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
347 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
348 tokenizer with very long source lines.
349
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000350- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
351 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
352
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000353- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
354 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000355
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000356- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
357 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
358
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000359- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
360 correctly.
361
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000362- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
363 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
364 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
365 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
366 between two lines.
367
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000368
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000369Build
370-----
371
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000372- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
373 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
374 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000375 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000376
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000377- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
378 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
379 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
380
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000381- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
382
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000383- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
384 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
385
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000386- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
387 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
388 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
389 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
390 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
391 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
392 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
393 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
394
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000395- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
396 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
397 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
398 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
399
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000400
401C API
402-----
403
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000404- Removed PyRange_New().
405
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000406
407Tests
408-----
409
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000410- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000411
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000412
413Documentation
414-------------
415
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000416- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
417
418- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
419
420- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
421
422- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
423
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000424- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
425 Closes bug #1166582.
426
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000427- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
428 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
429 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
430
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000431Mac
432---
433
434
435
436Tools/Demos
437-----------
438
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000439- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
440
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000441- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000442
443
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000444What's New in Python 2.4 final?
445===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000446
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000447*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000448
449Core and builtins
450-----------------
451
452- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
453 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
454 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
455
456
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000457What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
458==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000459
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000460*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000461
462Core and builtins
463-----------------
464
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000465- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
466 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
467 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
468
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000469
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000470Library
471-------
472
473- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
474 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
475 raised is re-raised.
476
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000477- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
478 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
479
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000480- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
481 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
482 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
483 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
484 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
485 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
486 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
487 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
488 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
489 by the slice are recomputed now.
490
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000491- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000492
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000493Build
494-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000495
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000496- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
497 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
498 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000499
500C API
501-----
502
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000503- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
504
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000505
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000506What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
507================================
508
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000509*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000510
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000511License
512-------
513
514The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
515is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
516changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
517Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
518intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
519durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
520the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
521License::
522
523 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
524
525says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
526to Python 2.1.1.
527
528The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
529License Version 2.
530
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000531Core and builtins
532-----------------
533
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000534- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
535 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
536 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
537 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
538 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
539 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
540 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
541 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
542 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
543 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
544
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000545- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000546
547Extension Modules
548-----------------
549
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000550- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
551 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
552 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
553 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000554
555Library
556-------
557
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000558- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
559 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
560 returned.
561
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000562- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
563
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000564- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
565 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
566
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000567- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
568
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000569- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
570 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000571
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000572- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
573
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000574- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
575
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000576- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000577 the source code is updated and reloaded.
578
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000579Build
580-----
581
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000582- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000583
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000584What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
585================================
586
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000587*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000588
589Core and builtins
590-----------------
591
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000592- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000593 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
594
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000595- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
596 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
597 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
598 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
599
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000600- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
601 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
602
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000603- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
604 constant.
605
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000606- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
607 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
608 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
609 large), and to anomalies such as
610 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
611 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
612 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
613 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000614
615Extension modules
616-----------------
617
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000618- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
619 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000620 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
621 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
622 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000623
624Library
625-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000626
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000627- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000628 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000629 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
630 --swig-cpp.
631
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000632- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
633 it is set.
634
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000635- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000636
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000637- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
638 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
639 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
640 Closes bug #1039270.
641
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000642- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000643
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000644 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000645 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
646 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
647 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
648 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
649 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
650 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
651 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
652 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
653 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
654 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
655 + Updates to documentation.
656
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000657- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
658 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
659 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
660 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
661
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000662- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000663
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000664- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
665 applications should use the getmember function.
666
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000667- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
668
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000669- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
670 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
671 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
672 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
673 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
674 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
675 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
676 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
677 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
678
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000679- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
680 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000681 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000682
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000683- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
684 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
685 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
686 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
687 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
688 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
689 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
690 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000691
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000692- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
693 the new public features (of which there are many).
694
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000695- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000696 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
697 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
698 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
699 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000700 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000701
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000702- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
703
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000704- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
705 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
706 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
707 options.
708
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000709- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
710 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
711 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
712 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
713 conditions under which non-string values work.
714
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000715Build
716-----
717
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000718- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
719 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
720 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
721
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000722- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
723 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
724 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
725 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
726 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000727
728C API
729-----
730
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000731- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
732 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
733
734- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
735
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000736- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
737 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
738 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
739 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
740 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
741 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
742 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
743 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
744 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
745
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000746- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
747
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000748- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
749 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
750 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000751
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000752Tests
753-----
754
755- test__locale ported to unittest
756
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000757Mac
758---
759
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000760- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
761 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
762 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000763
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000764Tools/Demos
765-----------
766
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000767- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
768 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
769 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
770 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
771 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000772
773
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000774What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
775=================================
776
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000777*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000778
779Core and builtins
780-----------------
781
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000782- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000783 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
784
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000785- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
786 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
787 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
788 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
789 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
790 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
791 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
792 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000793 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
794 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
795 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
796 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
797 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000798
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000799- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
800 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
801 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
802 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
803 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
804
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000805- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
806
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000807- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
808 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
809
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000810- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
811 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
812 modified the list.
813
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000814- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
815 functions is now writable.
816
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000817- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
818 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
819 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
820 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
821
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000822- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
823 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
824 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
825 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
826 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000827
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000828- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
829 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
830
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000831Extension modules
832-----------------
833
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000834- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
835
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000836- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
837 data.
838
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000839- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
840 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
841 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
842 supposed to have been truncated away.
843
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000844- Added socket.socketpair().
845
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000846- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
847 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
848
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000849- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000850 versions of Python, have now been removed.
851
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000852Library
853-------
854
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000855- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000856 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000857
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000858- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
859 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
860
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000861- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
862 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
863
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000864- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
865
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000866- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
867 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000868
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000869- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
870 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
871
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000872- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
873
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000874- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
875
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000876- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
877
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000878- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
879 Percivall.
880
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000881- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
882 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
883
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000884- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
885 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
886 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000887 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000888
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000889- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
890 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
891 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
892 and exponent.
893
894- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
895
896- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
897 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
898 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
899
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000900- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
901 to the readline module.
902
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000903- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000904 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
905 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000906
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000907- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
908 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
909 contains symlinks.
910
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000911- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
912 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
913
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000914- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
915 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
916 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
917
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000918- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
919 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
920 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
921 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
922 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
923 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
924 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
925 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
926 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
927 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
928 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
929 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
930 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
931
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000932- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
933
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000934Tools/Demos
935-----------
936
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000937- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
938 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
939
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000940- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
941
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000942Build
943-----
944
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000945- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
946 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
947 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
948 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
949 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
950 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
951 plans to do so.
952
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000953- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
954 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
955
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000956- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
957 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
958
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000959- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
960 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
961
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000962- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
963 GNU/k*BSD systems.
964
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000965- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
966 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
967
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000968C API
969-----
970
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000971..
972
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000973Documentation
974-------------
975
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000976- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
977 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
978
979- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
980 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
981 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000982
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000983New platforms
984-------------
985
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000986- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
987
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000988Tests
989-----
990
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000991..
992
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000993Windows
994-------
995
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000996- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
997 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
998 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
999 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1000 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1001 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1002 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1003 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1004 the problem.
1005
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001006Mac
1007---
1008
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001009..
1010
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001011
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001012What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1013=================================
1014
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001015*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001016
1017Core and builtins
1018-----------------
1019
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001020- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1021 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1022 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1023 sensitive code.
1024
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001025- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001026 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001027
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001028 @staticmethod
1029 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001030
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001031 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001032
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001033- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1034 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1035 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1036 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1037 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1038 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1039 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1040 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1041 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1042 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1043 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1044
1045 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1046 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1047 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1048 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1049 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1050 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1051 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1052
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001053- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1054 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1055
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001056- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001057 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001058
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001059- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001060 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001061 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1062
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001063- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001064 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1065 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1066
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001067- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1068 types that support garbage collection.
1069
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001070- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1071
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001072- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1073 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1074 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1075 Jython.
1076
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001077- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1078
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001079- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1080 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1081
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001082- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1083 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1084 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001085
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001086- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1087 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1088 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1089
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001090Extension modules
1091-----------------
1092
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001093- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1094
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001095Library
1096-------
1097
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001098- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1099 TIS-620
1100
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001101- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1102 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1103 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1104 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1105 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1106 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1107 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1108 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1109 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1110 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1111
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001112- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1113
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001114- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1115 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1116 same as when the argument is omitted).
1117 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1118
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001119- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1120
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001121- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1122 schemes are offered.
1123
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001124- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1125
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001126- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1127 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1128 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1129
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001130- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1131
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001132- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1133 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1134
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001135- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1136 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1137 when dummy_threading is being used.
1138
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001139- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1140 from a tarfile.
1141
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001142- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001143 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001144
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001145- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1146 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1147 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1148 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1149
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001150- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1151 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1152
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001153- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1154 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1155 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1156 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1157 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1158 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1159 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1160 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1161 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1162 by some other method in progress).
1163
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001164- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1165 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1166 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001167
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001168- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1169
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001170- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1171 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1172 AM Kuchling.
1173
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001174- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1175 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1176 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1177
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001178- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1179 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1180 instead of unsigned.
1181
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001182- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001183 no longer part of the public API.
1184
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001185- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1186 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1187 string methods of the same name).
1188
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001189- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001190 SF patch 945642.
1191
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001192- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1193
1194 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1195
1196 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1197 DocTestSuites.
1198
1199- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1200 that provide thread-local data.
1201
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001202- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1203 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1204
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001205- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1206
1207- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1208 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1209 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1210
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001211- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1212
1213 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1214 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1215 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001216
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001217 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1218 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1219 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1220 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1221
1222 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1223 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1224
1225 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1226 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1227 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1228 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1229
1230 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1231 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1232 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1233 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1234 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1235
1236 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1237 wrapping help output.
1238
1239 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1240 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1241 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001242
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001243C API
1244-----
1245
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001246- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1247 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1248 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1249 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1250 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1251 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1252 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1253 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1254 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1255 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1256 its visible semantics have not changed.
1257
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001258- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1259 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1260
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001261Documentation
1262-------------
1263
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001264- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001265
1266 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001267 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001268
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001269 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001270
1271 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1272
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001273- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001274
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001275Tests
1276-----
1277
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001278- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001279 platforms that use the Makefile.
1280
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001281- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1282 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1283 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1284
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001285
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001286What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1287=================================
1288
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001289*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001290
1291Core and builtins
1292-----------------
1293
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001294- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1295 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1296 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1297 objects now (one object instead of three).
1298
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001299- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1300 Windows DLLs.
1301
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001302- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1303 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001304
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001305- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1306 a new .pyc magic.
1307
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001308- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1309 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1310 be there.
1311
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001312- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1313 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1314 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1315
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001316- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1317 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1318 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1319
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001320- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1321
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001322- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1323 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1324 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001325
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001326- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1327 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1328
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001329- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1330
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001331- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001332 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001333
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001334- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1335
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001336- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1337
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001338- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1339 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1340
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001341- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1342 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1343 Fixes bug #858016 .
1344
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001345- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1346 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1347 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1348
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001349- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1350 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1351 improves their performance (about 35%).
1352
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001353- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1354 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1355 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1356
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001357- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1358 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1359 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1360 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1361
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001362- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1363 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001364 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001365 length is not known).
1366
1367- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1368 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001369 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1370 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001371 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1372
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001373- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1374 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1375
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001376- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1377 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1378 keyword arguments.
1379
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001380- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1381 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1382 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1383
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001384- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1385 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1386 cases.
1387
1388- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1389 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1390 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1391 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1392 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1393 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1394 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1395 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1396 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1397 a release build.
1398
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001399- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1400 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1401
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001402- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001403 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001404
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001405- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1406 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1407 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1408 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1409 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1410 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1411 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1412 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1413 destroyed.
1414
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001415- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1416 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1417 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1418 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1419 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1420 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1421 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1422 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1423
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001424- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1425 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1426 character other than a space.
1427
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001428- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1429 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1430 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1431 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1432 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1433 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1434 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1435 attributes with the same name.
1436
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001437- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1438 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1439 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1440 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1441 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1442 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1443 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1444 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1445 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1446 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1447 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1448 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1449 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1450 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001451
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001452- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1453 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1454 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1455 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1456 This has been repaired.
1457
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001458- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1459
1460- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1461
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001462- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1463 over a sequence.
1464
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001465- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001466 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001467
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001468- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1469
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001470- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1471 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1472 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1473 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1474 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1475 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1476 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1477 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1478
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001479- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1480 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1481 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1482
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001483- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1484 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1485 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1486 freelist.
1487
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001488- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1489 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1490
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001491- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1492 number.
1493
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001494- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1495 a TypeError exception.
1496
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001497- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1498 820195.
1499
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001500- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1501 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1502 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1503
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001504- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001505 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1506 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001507
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001508- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1509 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1510 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1511
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001512- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1513 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001514 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001515
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001516- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001517 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1518 the first call.
1519
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001520
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001521Extension modules
1522-----------------
1523
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001524- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1525 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1526
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001527- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1528 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1529 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1530 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1531 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1532 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1533 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001534
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001535- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1536
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001537- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1538
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001539- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1540 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1541
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001542- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1543 fewer false positives.
1544
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001545- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1546 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1547
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001548- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001549 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1550
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001551- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001552 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001553 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001554 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1555 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001556
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001557- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1558 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1559 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1560 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1561
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001562- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1563 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1564 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1565 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1566 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1567 #897625.
1568
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001569- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1570 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1571
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001572- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1573 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1574 and pops on either side of the deque.
1575
1576- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1577 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1578
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001579- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1580 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1581 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1582 other functions that expect a function argument.
1583
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001584- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1585
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001586- os.getsid was added.
1587
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001588- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1589 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1590 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1591
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001592- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1593
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001594- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1595
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001596- readline.clear_history was added.
1597
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001598- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1599
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001600- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1601
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001602- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1603
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001604- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1605
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001606- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1607
1608- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1609
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001610- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1611
1612- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1613
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001614- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1615 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1616 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1617
1618- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1619 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1620 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1621 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1622 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1623 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1624 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1625
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001626- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1627 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1628 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1629 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001630
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001631- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001632 iterators from a single iterable.
1633
1634- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1635 of raising a TypeError exception.
1636
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001637- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1638 as parameter.
1639
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001640Library
1641-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001642
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001643- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1644 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1645 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001646
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001647- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1648 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1649 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001650
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001651- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001652
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001653- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1654 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001655
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001656- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1657 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1658
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001659- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1660
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001661- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001662 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001663
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001664- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001665 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001666
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001667- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1668
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001669- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1670 on cygwin and mingw32.
1671
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001672- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1673
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001674- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1675 module.
1676
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001677- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1678 installation scheme for all platforms.
1679
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001680- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001681 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001682
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001683- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1684 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1685 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1686
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001687- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1688 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1689 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1690
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001691- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1692
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001693- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1694
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001695- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1696 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1697
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001698- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1699 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1700 type pattern with the same value exists.
1701
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001702- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1703 when run from the command prompt).
1704
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001705- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1706 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1707
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001708- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1709 default sort).
1710
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001711- Added global runctx function to profile module
1712
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001713- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1714
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001715- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1716
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001717- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1718
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001719- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001720 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1721 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1722 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1723 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1724 accordingly.
1725
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001726- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1727 decoding standards.
1728
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001729- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1730 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1731 called for all requests.
1732
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001733- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1734 they are passed to the compiler.
1735
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001736- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1737 indent, width and depth.
1738
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001739- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1740 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1741
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001742- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1743 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1744
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001745- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1746
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001747- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1748
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001749- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1750
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001751- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1752 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1753
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001754- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001755 for better performance.
1756
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001757- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001758
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001759- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1760 a string).
1761
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001762- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1763
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001764- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1765
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001766- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1767
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001768- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1769
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001770- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1771 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1772 list of fieldnames.
1773
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001774- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1775 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1776
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001777- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1778
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001779- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1780 empty lists.
1781
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001782- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1783 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1784 and shelves.
1785
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001786- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1787 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1788
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001789- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001790 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1791 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001792
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001793- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1794 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001795 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001796
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001797- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001798 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1799 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1800
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001801- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1802 and removed in Py2.4.
1803
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001804- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1805
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001806- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1807
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001808Tools/Demos
1809-----------
1810
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001811- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1812 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1813
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001814- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1815
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001816- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1817 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1818 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1819 destination in situations where both files are given.
1820
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001821- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1822 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1823 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1824 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1825
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001826- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1827
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001828- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1829 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1830 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1831 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1832 now.
1833
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001834- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1835 in effect
1836
1837- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1838 C-c C-h
1839
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001840- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1841 -d option was given.
1842
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001843Build
1844-----
1845
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001846- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1847 build under OS X.
1848
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001849- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1850 --enable-profiling.
1851
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001852- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1853 is configured --with-tsc.
1854
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001855- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1856 on AMD64.
1857
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001858- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1859 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1860
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001861- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1862 removed.
1863
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001864- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1865 supported (see PEP 11).
1866
1867- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1868
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001869- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1870
1871- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1872 (see PEP 11).
1873
1874- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1875 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1876
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001877C API
1878-----
1879
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001880- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1881 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1882 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1883
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001884- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1885 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1886 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1887 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1888
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001889- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1890 generator objects.
1891
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001892- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1893 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001894 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1895 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001896
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001897- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1898 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1899
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001900- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1901 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1902 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1903 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1904 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1905
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001906- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1907 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1908 about 10% faster.
1909
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001910- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1911 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1912
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001913- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1914 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1915 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1916 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1917
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001918Windows
1919-------
1920
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001921- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1922 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1923 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1924 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1925
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001926- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1927 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1928 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1929
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001930
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001931What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1932===============================
1933
1934*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1935
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001936IDLE
1937----
1938
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001939- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1940 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1941 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1942 context-menu actions.
1943
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001944- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1945 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1946 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1947 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1948 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1949 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1950 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1951 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1952 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1953
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001954
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001955What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1956=============================================
1957
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001958*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001959
1960Core and builtins
1961-----------------
1962
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001963- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001964 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001965 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1966
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001967Extension modules
1968-----------------
1969
1970- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1971 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1972 than once. This has been fixed.
1973
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001974- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1975 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1976 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1977 call.
1978
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001979- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1980
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001981Library
1982-------
1983
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001984- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1985 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1986
1987- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1988 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1989 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1990 restored.
1991
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001992IDLE
1993----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001994
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001995- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001996
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001997Build
1998-----
1999
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002000- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2001 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2002
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002003C API
2004-----
2005
2006Windows
2007-------
2008
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002009- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2010 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2011
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002012- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2013
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002014Mac
2015---
2016
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002017- Various fixes to pimp.
2018
2019- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2020
2021- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2022 more problems than it solves.
2023
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002024
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002025What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2026=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002027
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002028*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2029
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002030Core and builtins
2031-----------------
2032
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002033- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2034 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2035
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002036- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2037 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002038 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002039
2040- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2041 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2042 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002043 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002044
2045- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2046 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002047
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002048- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2049 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2050 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2051
2052- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002053 770247.
2054
2055- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002056
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002057Extension modules
2058-----------------
2059
2060- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2061 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2062
2063- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2064
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002065- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2066
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002067- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2068 contained within the _strptime module.
2069
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002070- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2071 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2072
2073- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002074 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2075
2076- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2077 the find_class attribute, if present.
2078
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002079- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002080
2081 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2082 (SF bug 763298).
2083
2084 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002085 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2086 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2087 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002088
2089 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2090
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002091Library
2092-------
2093
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002094- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2095
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002096- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2097 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2098 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2099 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2100 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2101 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2102 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2103 or Tester().
2104
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002105- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2106 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2107 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2108 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2109 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2110 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2111 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2112 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2113 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002114
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002115 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002116
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002117- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2118 weren't before was an oversight.
2119
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002120- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2121 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2122
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002123- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2124 when there are no lines.
2125
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002126- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2127 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2128
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002129- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2130 to child processes.
2131
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002132- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2133
2134- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2135
2136- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2137 xmlrpclib.
2138
2139- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2140 responses.
2141
2142- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2143 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2144
2145- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2146 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2147 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2148
2149- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2150 used as patterns.
2151
2152- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2153 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2154 than Tk 8.3.
2155
2156- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2157
2158- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002159
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002160Tools/Demos
2161-----------
2162
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002163- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2164
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002165- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2166
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002167- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002168
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002169Build
2170-----
2171
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002172- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2173
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002174- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2175
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002176- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2177 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002178
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002179- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2180 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2181 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002182
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002183C API
2184-----
2185
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002186- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2187 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2188
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002189Windows
2190-------
2191
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002192- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2193 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2194 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2195 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2196 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2197 Python exception ::
2198
2199 thread.error: can't start new thread
2200
2201 is raised now.
2202
2203- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2204 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2205 instead of from DLL teardown.
2206
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002207Mac
2208---
2209
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002210- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002211 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002212 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2213 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2214 the executable in the bundle.
2215
2216- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002217
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002218- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2219
2220- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2221 on Panther.
2222
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002223What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2224================================
2225
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002226*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002227
2228Core and builtins
2229-----------------
2230
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002231- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2232 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2233 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2234 with the -i option.
2235
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002236- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2237 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2238
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002239- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2240 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2241
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002242- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2243 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2244 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2245 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2246 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2247 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2248 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2249 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2250 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2251 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2252 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2253 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2254 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002255
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002256- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2257 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2258 embedded in a lambda expression.
2259
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002260- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2261 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2262 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2263 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2264 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2265
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002266- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2267 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2268 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2269
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002270- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2271 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2272
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002273- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2274 It's writable again.
2275
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002276- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2277 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2278 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002279 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002280
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002281- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2282 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2283 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2284
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002285Extension modules
2286-----------------
2287
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002288- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2289 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2290
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002291- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2292 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2293 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2294 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2295
2296- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2297 collection.
2298
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002299- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2300 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2301 unique within a single program run.
2302
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002303- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2304 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2305
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002306- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2307 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2308
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002309- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2310 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002311
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002312- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2313
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002314- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2315 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2316
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002317- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2318 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2319 for many BSD-derived systems.
2320
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002321
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002322Library
2323-------
2324
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002325- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2326 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2327 primary ones:
2328
2329 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2330 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2331 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2332
2333 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2334 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2335 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2336 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2337 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2338 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2339
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002340- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2341 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2342 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2343 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2344 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2345 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2346 argument.
2347
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002348- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2349 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2350 in the archive.
2351
2352- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2353 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2354
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002355- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2356 569574).
2357
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002358- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2359 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2360 no more.
2361
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002362- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2363 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2364 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2365 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2366 code coverage.
2367
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002368- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2369 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2370 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002371 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2372 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002373
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002374- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2375 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2376 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002377 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002378
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002379- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2380
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002381- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2382 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2383 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2384 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2385
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002386- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2387 handling.
2388
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002389- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2390 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2391
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002392- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2393 in socket.py.
2394
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002395- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2396
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002397- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2398 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2399 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2400 opener with proxy support.
2401
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002402- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2403
2404- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2405
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002406Tools/Demos
2407-----------
2408
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002409- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2410
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002411- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2412
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002413- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2414 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002415
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002416- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2417 files.
2418
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002419Build
2420-----
2421
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002422- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002423 different root directory.
2424
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002425C API
2426-----
2427
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002428- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2429 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2430 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2431 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2432 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2433 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2434 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2435 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2436 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2437 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2438
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002439- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2440 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2441 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2442 from Python.
2443
2444
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002445New platforms
2446-------------
2447
2448None this time.
2449
2450Tests
2451-----
2452
2453- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2454 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2455
2456Windows
2457-------
2458
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002459- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2460
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002461- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2462 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2463 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2464 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2465 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2466 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2467 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2468 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2469 that's what it's for.
2470
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002471Mac
2472---
2473
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002474- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2475 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2476 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2477 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002478- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2479 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2480- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002481
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002482SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2483------------------------------------
2484
2485430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2486598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2487622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2488661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2489683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2490697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2491713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2492724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2493727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2494729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2495730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2496731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2497732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2498733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2499735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2500740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2501744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2502745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2503747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2504749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2505751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2506753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2507755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2508757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2509760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2510
2511
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002512What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2513================================
2514
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002515*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002516
2517Core and builtins
2518-----------------
2519
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002520- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2521 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2522
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002523- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2524 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2525 and cannot be strings).
2526
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002527- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2528 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2529 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2530 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2531
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002532- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2533 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2534 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2535 Python itself.
2536
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002537- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2538 the referenced object, if it has one.
2539
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002540- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2541 the thread started at
2542 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2543
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002544- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2545 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2546 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2547 placed on a list index.
2548
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002549- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2550 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2551 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2552 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2553
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002554- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2555 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2556 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2557 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2558 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2559 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2560 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2561
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002562- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2563 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2564 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2565 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2566 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2567
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002568- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2569 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002570
2571- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2572 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2573 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2574 #693195.)
2575
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002576- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2577 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002578
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002579- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002580 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002581 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2582 interpreter executions, would fail.
2583
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002584- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002585 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002586 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002587
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002588Extension modules
2589-----------------
2590
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002591- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2592 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2593 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2594 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2595
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002596- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2597 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2598
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002599- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2600 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2601 and Greg Chapman.)
2602
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002603- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2604 recursively.
2605
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002606- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002607 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2608 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2609 leaks.
2610
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002611- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2612
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002613- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2614 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2615 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2616 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2617 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2618 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2619 #705836.
2620
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002621- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002622 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2623
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002624- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2625 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2626 See SF bug #692416.
2627
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002628- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2629 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2630
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002631- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2632 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2633 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002634
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002635- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002636 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2637 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2638
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002639- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2640 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2641 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2642 timeouts to work properly.
2643
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002644Library
2645-------
2646
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002647- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2648 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2649 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2650 future release.
2651
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002652- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2653 for querying platform dependent features.
2654
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002655- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002656
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002657- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2658 pickle protocol versions.
2659
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002660- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2661 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2662 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2663
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002664- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2665
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002666- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2667 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2668 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2669 modules.
2670
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002671- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2672 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2673 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2674
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002675- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2676 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2677
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002678- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2679 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2680 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2681
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002682- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002683 MS Office extensions.
2684
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002685- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2686 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2687
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002688- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2689 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2690
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002691- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2692 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2693 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2694 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2695 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2696 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2697
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002698- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2699 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2700 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002701
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002702- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2703 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2704 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2705
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002706- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2707
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002708- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2709 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2710 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2711
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002712Tools/Demos
2713-----------
2714
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002715- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2716 See the module docstring for details.
2717
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002718Build
2719-----
2720
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002721- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2722 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002723
2724C API
2725-----
2726
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002727- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2728
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002729- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2730 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2731 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2732
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002733- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2734 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002735
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002736 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2737 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2738 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002739
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002740- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002741 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2742
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002743- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2744 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2745 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002746
2747New platforms
2748-------------
2749
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002750None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002751
2752Tests
2753-----
2754
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002755- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2756 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002757
2758Windows
2759-------
2760
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002761- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2762 function.
2763
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002764- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2765 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002766
2767Mac
2768---
2769
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002770- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2771 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002772
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002773- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2774 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002775
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002776- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2777 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2778 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002779
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002780- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002781 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2782 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002783
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002784- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2785 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002786
2787
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002788What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2789=================================
2790
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002791*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002792
2793Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002794-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002795
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002796- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2797 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2798 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2799
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002800- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2801 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2802 (SF patch #664376.)
2803
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002804- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2805 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2806 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2807 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2808 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2809 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002810 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002811
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002812- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2813 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2814 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2815 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002816 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002817
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002818- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2819 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2820 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2821 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2822 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2823 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2824 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2825 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2826 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2827 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2828 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2829
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002830- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2831 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2832 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2833 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2834 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2835 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2836
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002837- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2838 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2839
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002840- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2841 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2842 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2843 case.)
2844
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002845- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2846 passed as unicode strings.
2847
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002848- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2849 See SF bug #683467.
2850
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002851- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2852 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2853
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002854- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2855
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002856- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2857
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002858- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2859 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2860 arguments.
2861
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002862- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2863 See SF bug #667147.
2864
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002865- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002866 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002867 See SF bug #676155.
2868
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002869- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002870 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002871 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2872 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2873 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2874 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2875 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2876 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002877
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002878Extension modules
2879-----------------
2880
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002881- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2882 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2883 tp_as_number pointer.
2884
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002885- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2886 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2887 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2888 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2889 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2890
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002891- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2892
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002893- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2894
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002895- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002896 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002897 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2898 patch #678531.)
2899
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002900- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2901 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2902
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002903- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2904 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2905
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002906- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2907
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002908- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2909 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2910 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2911
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002912- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2913
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002914- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2915 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2916
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002917- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002918
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002919- datetime changes:
2920
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002921 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2922
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002923 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2924 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2925 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2926 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2927 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2928 now.
2929
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002930 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002931 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2932 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002933
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002934 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002935 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002936 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2937 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2938 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2939 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002940
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002941 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2942 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2943 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002944 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2945
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002946 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2947 by a later example coded by Guido.
2948
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002949 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002950 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2951 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2952 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002953 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2954 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2955
2956 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2957 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2958 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2959 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2960 tzinfo subclass instance.
2961
2962 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2963 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2964 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2965 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2966 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2967 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2968 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2969 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002970
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002971 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2972 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2973 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2974 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2975 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002976 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2977
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002978 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002979
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002980 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2981 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2982 as a naive datetime object.
2983
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002984 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2985 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2986 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2987
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002988 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2989 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2990 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2991 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2992 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2993 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2994 comparison.
2995
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002996 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2997 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2998 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2999 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003000 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003001
3002 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003003
3004 and ::
3005
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003006 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3007
3008 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3009 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3010 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3011 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3012
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003013 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3014 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3015 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3016 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3017 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3018
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003019 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3020 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003021 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3022 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003023
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003024Library
3025-------
3026
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003027- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3028 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3029
3030- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3031 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3032 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3033 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3034 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3035 See PEP 307 for details.
3036
3037- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3038 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3039
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003040- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3041 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003042 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003043 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3044 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003045 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003046
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003047- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3048 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3049
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003050- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3051 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3052 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3053
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003054- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3055
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003056- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3057 exception.
3058
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003059- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3060 class.
3061
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003062- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3063 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3064 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3065
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003066- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3067 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3068
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003069- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003070 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3071 See SF bug #659228.
3072
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003073- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3074 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3075 See SF patch #651082.
3076
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003077- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003078
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003079- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3080 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3081
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003082- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003083 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003084
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003085- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3086 DOS paths from other platforms.
3087
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003088Tools/Demos
3089-----------
3090
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003091- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3092 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3093 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3094 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3095 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3096 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3097 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3098 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3099 example:
3100
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003101 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3102 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003103
3104 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3105
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003106
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003107Build
3108-----
3109
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003110- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3111 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3112 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003113 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3114
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003115 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3116
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003117- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3118 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3119 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3120 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3121 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3122 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3123 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3124 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3125 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3126
3127- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3128 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3129 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3130 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3131
3132- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3133 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3134
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003135C API
3136-----
3137
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003138- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3139 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003140
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003141- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3142 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3143 tp_as_number pointer.
3144
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003145- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3146 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3147 (SF #681367)
3148
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003149- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3150 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3151 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3152 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003153
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003154Tests
3155-----
3156
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003157- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003158 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3159 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3160 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3161 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3162 pydoc.)
3163
3164- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3165
3166- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003167
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003168Windows
3169-------
3170
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003171- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3172 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3173 time).
3174
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003175- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3176 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3177
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003178- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3179 release without strong cryptography.
3180
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003181- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003182 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003183
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003184- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3185 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3186
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003187Mac
3188---
3189
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003190- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3191 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003192
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003193- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3194 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3195 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003196
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003197- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3198 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003199
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003200- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3201 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3202 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3203 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003204
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003205- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003206 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3207 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3208 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003209
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003210
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003211What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003212=================================
3213
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003214*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003215
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003216Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003217--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003218
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003219- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3220
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003221- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3222 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003223 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003224 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003225 a different meaning than before.
3226
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003227- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003228 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003229 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003230
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003231- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003232 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003233 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003234
3235- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3236 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3237 and deallocation.
3238
3239- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3240 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3241
3242- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3243 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3244 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3245 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3246 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3247
3248- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3249 now detected by the garbage collector.
3250
3251- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3252 [SF bug 519621]
3253
3254- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3255 identifier.
3256
3257- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3258 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3259 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3260 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3261 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3262 [SF bug 563060]
3263
3264- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3265 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3266 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3267 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3268 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3269
3270- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3271 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3272 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3273
3274- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3275
3276- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3277 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3278 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3279 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3280 state of the slots would be lost.)
3281
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003282Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003283-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003284
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003285- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003286 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3287 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3288 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3289 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003290 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3291 Jython 2.1.
3292
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003293- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003294 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003295 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3296 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3297 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3298 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3299 these, see PEP 302.
3300
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003301- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3302 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3303 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3304
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003305- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3306 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3307 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3308
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003309- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3310 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3311 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3312
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003313- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3314 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3315 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3316 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3317 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3318 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3319 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3320 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3321 releases or implementations.
3322
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003323- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003324 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3325 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003326
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003327- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3328 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3329
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003330- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3331 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3332 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3333
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003334- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3335 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3336
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003337- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3338 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003339 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3340 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003341
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003342- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3343 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3344 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3345 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3346 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3347
3348 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3349 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3350 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3351 pattern.
3352
3353 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3354 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3355 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3356 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3357
3358 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3359 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3360 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3361 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3362 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3363 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3364
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003365- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3366 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3367 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3368 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3369 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3370 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3371 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3372 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003373
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003374- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3375 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3376 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3377 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3378 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003379 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3380 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3381 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3382 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3383 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3384 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3385 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003386
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003387- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3388 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3389
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003390- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3391 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3392 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3393 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3394 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3395 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3396 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3397 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3398 to Zack Weinberg!
3399
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003400- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3401 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3402 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3403 type. This has been fixed now.
3404
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003405- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3406 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3407 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3408
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003409- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3410 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3411 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3412 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3413 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3414 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3415 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3416 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003417 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003418
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003419- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3420 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3421 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003422
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003423- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3424 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3425 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3426 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3427 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3428 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3429 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3430 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003431 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003432 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3433 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3434
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003435- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3436 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3437 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3438 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3439 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3440 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3441 this.)
3442
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003443- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3444 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003445 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003446 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003447 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3448 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003449 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3450 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003451
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003452- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3453 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3454 currently running.
3455
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003456- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3457 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3458 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3459 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3460
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003461- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3462 as directory names.
3463
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003464- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3465 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3466
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003467- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3468 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3469
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003470- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003471 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3472 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003473
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003474- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3475 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3476 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3477 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3478 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3479
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003480- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3481 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3482 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3483 removed.
3484
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003485- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3486 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3487 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3488
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003489- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3490 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3491 to __debug__.
3492
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003493- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3494 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3495 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3496
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003497- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3498 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3499 deprecated now.
3500
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003501- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3502 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3503 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003504
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003505- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3506 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3507 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3508 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3509 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003510
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003511- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3512 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3513
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003514- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3515 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3516 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003517 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003518 is backward compatible.
3519
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003520- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3521 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3522 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3523 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3524 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3525
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003526- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3527 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3528 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3529 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3530 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3531 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003532
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003533- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3534 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3535
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003536- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3537 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3538
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003539- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3540 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3541 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3542 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3543 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3544
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003545- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3546 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3547 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3548
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003549- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003550 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3551
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003552- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3553 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3554 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003555
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003556- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3557 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3558
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003559- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3560 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3561 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3562
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003563- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3564
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003565Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003566-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003567
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003568- Added three operators to the operator module:
3569 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3570 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3571 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3572
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003573- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3574
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003575- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3576 archives.
3577
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003578- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3579 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3580 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3581
3582 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3583
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003584- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3585 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3586 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003587 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003588
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003589- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3590 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3591 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3592 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003593 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3594 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3595 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3596 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003597
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003598- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3599 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003600
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003601- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3602
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003603- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3604 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3605
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003606- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3607 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3608 supported.
3609
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003610- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3611
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003612- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3613 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003614
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003615- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3616 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3617
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003618- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3619
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003620- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3621 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3622
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003623- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3624 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3625 functions but callable type objects.
3626
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003627- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003628 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003629 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003630
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003631- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3632 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003633
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003634- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3635 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003636
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003637- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3638 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3639 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3640 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3641
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003642- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3643 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003644
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003645- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3646 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3647 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3648 and __imul__.
3649
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003650- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003651 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3652 is called.
3653
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003654- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3655 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3656 interpreter was compiled.
3657
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003658- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3659 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3660 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003661 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003662 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3663 1, not 2.
3664
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003665- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3666 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3667 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3668 limit.
3669
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003670- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3671 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3672 bug #623464.
3673
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003674- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3675 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3676 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3677 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3678
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003679Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003680-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003681
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003682- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3683
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003684- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3685 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3686 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3687 with Python 2.3a2.
3688
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003689- os.path exposes getctime.
3690
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003691- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003692 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003693 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003694 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003695 unit tests of floating point results.
3696
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003697- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3698 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3699 has been increased.
3700
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003701- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3702 executed.
3703
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003704- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3705 postinstallation script.
3706
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003707- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3708 test the current module.
3709
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003710- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003711 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3712 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3713 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3714 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3715
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003716- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003717 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003718 Ward's Optik package.
3719
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003720- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3721 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3722 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3723 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3724
3725- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3726 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003727 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003728
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003729- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3730 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3731 shelf are binary pickles.
3732
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003733- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3734 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3735
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003736- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3737 modules are iterators now.
3738
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003739- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3740 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3741 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3742 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3743 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3744 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003745
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003746- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3747 with their entity value.
3748
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003749- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3750
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003751- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3752 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003753
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003754- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3755 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003756 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003757
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003758- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3759 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3760 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3761 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3762 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3763 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3764 main():
3765
3766 import locale
3767 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3768
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003769- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3770 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3771
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003772- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3773 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3774 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3775 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3776 to the new standard.
3777
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003778- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3779 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3780 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3781 an extension to the database.
3782
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003783- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3784 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3785 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3786 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003787 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003788
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003789- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003790 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003791
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003792- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3793 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3794 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3795 bounded integers.
3796
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003797- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3798 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3799 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3800 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3801 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3802 in existence.
3803
3804 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3805 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3806 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3807 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3808 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3809 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3810
3811 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3812 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3813 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3814 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3815
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003816- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3817 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3818 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3819
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003820- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3821
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003822- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3823 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3824 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3825 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3826
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003827- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3828 argument.
3829
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003830- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3831 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3832 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3833 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3834 [SF patch 560794].
3835
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003836- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3837 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3838 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003839 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3840 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3841 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003842
3843- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3844 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003845
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003846- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3847 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3848 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3849 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003850
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003851- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3852 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3853 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3854 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3855 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3856
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003857- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003858
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003859- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3860
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003861- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3862 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3863 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3864 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3865 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3866 identical to None.
3867
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003868- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3869 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3870 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3871 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3872 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3873 results now.
3874
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003875- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3876 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3877
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003878- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3879 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3880 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3881 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3882 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3883 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3884 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3885 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3886
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003887- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3888
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003889- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3890 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3891
3892- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3893 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3894 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3895 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3896 and other systems.
3897
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003898- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3899 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3900 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3901 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 +00003902 work well with these.
3903
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003904- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3905
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003906- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003907 connections.
3908
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003909- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3910 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3911 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3912
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003913- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3914 sets
3915
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003916- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3917 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3918 name.
3919
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003920- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3921 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3922 passed in.
3923
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003924- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003925 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003926 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3927 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003928
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003929- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3930
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003931- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3932
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003933- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3934 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3935 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3936
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003937- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3938 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3939 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3940 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003941 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003942
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003943- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003944 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003945 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003946
3947- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3948 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3949 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3950
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003951- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003952 the value of its expression argument.
3953
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003954- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3955 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3956 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3957
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003958- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3959 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3960 skipstone browser was included.
3961
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003962- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3963 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3964
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003965Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003966-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003967
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003968- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3969 names in addition to accepting file names.
3970
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003971- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3972 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3973 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3974 still used and useful.)
3975
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003976- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3977 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3978 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3979 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003980
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003981- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3982 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3983 the generated binary.
3984
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003985Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003986-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003987
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003988- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3989
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003990- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3991 except in the hands of experts.
3992
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003993- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003994 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3995 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3996 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003997
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003998- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3999 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4000 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4001 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4002 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4003 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4004 builds.
4005
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004006- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4007 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4008 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4009 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4010 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4011 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4012 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4013 new type.
4014
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004015- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004016
4017 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4018 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4019 positive infinities.
4020
4021 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4022 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4023 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4024 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4025 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4026 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4027 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4028
4029 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4030
4031 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4032
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004033- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4034 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4035 size of the executable.
4036
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004037- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4038 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4039 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4040 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004041
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004042- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4043
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004044- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4045 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4046 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004047
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004048- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4049 well as Unix.
4050
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004051- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4052 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4053 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4054 modules in the README file for details.
4055
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004056C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004057-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004058
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004059- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4060 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004061 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004062 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004063 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004064
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004065- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4066 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4067 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4068 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4069 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4070 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004071 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004072 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4073 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4074 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4075 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4076 aligned.)
4077
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004078- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4079 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4080 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4081
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004082- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4083 level.
4084
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004085- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4086 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4087 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4088 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4089 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4090
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004091- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4092 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4093 code.
4094
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004095- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4096 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4097 adjusting for negative indices.
4098
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004099- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4100 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4101 object.
4102
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004103- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4104 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4105 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4106
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004107- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4108 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004109
4110- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4111
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004112- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4113 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4114 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4115 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4116
4117- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4118
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004119- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004120
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004121- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004122 without going through the buffer API.
4123
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004124- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004125
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004126- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4127 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4128 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4129 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4130
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004131- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4132 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4133
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004134- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004135 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4136
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004137New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004138-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004139
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004140- OpenVMS is now supported.
4141
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004142- AtheOS is now supported.
4143
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004144- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4145
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004146- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4147
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004148Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004149-----
4150
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004151- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4152 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4153 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004154
4155Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004156-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004157
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004158- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4159 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4160 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4161 bugs.
4162 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004163 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004164 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4165 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004166 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004167
4168- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004169 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004170
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004171- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4172 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4173
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004174- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4175 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004176 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004177 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4178
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004179- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4180 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4181 use files" uninstall option).
4182
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004183- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4184
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004185- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4186 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4187
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004188- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4189 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4190 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4191
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004192- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4193 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4194 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4195 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4196 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004197 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4198 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4199 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004200
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004201- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004202 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004203 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4204 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4205 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4206 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4207 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4208 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4209 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4210 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4211 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4212 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4213 work around.
4214
4215- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4216 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4217 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4218 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4219 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4220 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4221 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4222 specified with O_CREAT too).
4223
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004224Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004225----
4226
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004227- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004228
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004229- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4230 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4231 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4232
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004233- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4234 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4235 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4236
4237- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4238 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4239 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4240 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4241 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4242 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4243 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4244 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004245
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004246- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4247 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4248 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004249
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004250- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4251 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4252 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4253 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4254 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004255
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004256- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4257 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4258 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004259
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004260- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4261 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004262
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004263- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4264 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4265 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4266 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4267 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004268
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004269- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4270 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4271 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4272
4273- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4274 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4275 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004276
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004277- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4278 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4279 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4280 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004281 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004282
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004283- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4284 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004285
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004286- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4287 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004288
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004289- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004290 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004291 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4292 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004293
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004294
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004295What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004296===============================
4297
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004298*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4299
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004300Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004301--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004302
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004303- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4304 with a custom metaclass.
4305
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004306Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004307-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004308
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004309- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4310 are proxies.
4311
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004312Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004313-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004314
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004315- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4316 very short strings.
4317
4318- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4319 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4320 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4321 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4322 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4323
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004324Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004325-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004326
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004327- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4328 close or delete time).
4329
4330- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4331 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4332
4333- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4334
4335- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004336 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004337
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004338Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004339-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004340
4341Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004342-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004343
4344C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004345-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004346
4347New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004348-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004349
4350Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004351-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004352
4353Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004354-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004355
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004356- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4357
4358- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4359 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4360
4361- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4362 deleted at process exit time.
4363
4364- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4365 in backslash.
4366
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004367Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004368----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004369
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004370- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4371 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4372 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4373
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004374
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004375What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004376===========================
4377
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004378*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4379
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004380Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004381--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004382
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004383- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4384 been extensively updated. See
4385
4386 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4387
4388 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4389
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004390- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4391 deleted!
4392
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004393- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4394 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4395 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4396 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4397 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4398
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004399- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4400
4401 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4402 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4403
4404 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4405 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4406 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4407 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4408 supported anyway.
4409
4410 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4411 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4412
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004413- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4414 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4415 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4416 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4417 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004418
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004419- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4420 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4421 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4422
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004423Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004424-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004425
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004426- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4427 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4428 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4429 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4430 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4431 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004432 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4433 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4434 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4435 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004436
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004437- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4438 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4439 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4440
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004441Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004442-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004443
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004444- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4445
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004446Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004447-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004448
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004449- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4450 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4451 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4452 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4453 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4454 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4455
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004456- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4457
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004458- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4459
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004460- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4461
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004462- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4463 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4464 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4465
4466- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4467
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004468Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004469-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004470
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004471- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4472 off a search on Google.
4473
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004474Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004475-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004476
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004477- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4478 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4479 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4480 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4481 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4482 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4483 other platforms should do likewise.
4484
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004485- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4486 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4487 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4488
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004489C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004490-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004491
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004492- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4493 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4494 producing key-value pairs.
4495
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004496- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004497 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004498 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4499 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4500 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4501 previously went unchallenged.
4502
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004503New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004504-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004505
4506Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004507-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004508
4509Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004510-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004511
4512Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004513----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004514
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004515- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4516 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004517
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004518- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4519 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4520 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4521 home.
4522
4523
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004524What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004525===========================
4526
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004527*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4528
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004529Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004530--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004531
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004532- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4533 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004534
4535 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004536 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004537
4538 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4539 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004540 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004541 This needs to be documented.
4542
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004543- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4544 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4545
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004546- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4547 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4548 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4549
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004550- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4551 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4552
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004553- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4554 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4555 class forbids it).
4556
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004557- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4558 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4559 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4560
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004561- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4562
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004563Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004564-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004565
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004566- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4567 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004568 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004569
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004570- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4571 (like 1 + '').
4572
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004573Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004574-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004575
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004576- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4577 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4578 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4579 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004580 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004581 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4582
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004583- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4584 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4585 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4586 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4587
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004588- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4589 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004590 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4591 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4592 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004593
4594- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4595 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004596
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004597- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4598 bytes on its input.
4599
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004600Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004601-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004602
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004603- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004604 convenience function.
4605
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004606- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4607 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4608 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004609 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4610 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4611 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4612 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4613 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4614 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004615
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004616- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4617 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4618 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4619 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4620
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004621- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4622 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4623 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4624
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004625- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4626 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4627 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4628 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4629
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004630- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4631 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004632 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004633 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4634 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4635 new -l and -e options.
4636
4637- statcache is now deprecated.
4638
4639- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4640 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004641 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004642 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4643 time properly taken into account.
4644
4645- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4646 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4647 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4648 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4649
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004650Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004651-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004652
4653Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004654-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004655
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004656- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4657 is built with libdb3 if available.
4658
4659- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4660
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004661C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004662-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004663
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004664- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4665 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4666 PySequence_Size().
4667
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004668- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4669
4670- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4671 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4672 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4673
4674- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4675 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4676
4677- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4678 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4679
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004680New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004681-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004682
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004683- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4684 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4685
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004686- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4687 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4688
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004689- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4690
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004691Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004692-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004693
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004694- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4695 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4696
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004697Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004698-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004699
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004700Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004701----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004702
4703- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4704 removed completely in the next release.
4705
4706- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4707 OSX.
4708
4709- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4710 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4711
4712- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4713
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004714
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004715What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004716===========================
4717
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004718*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4719
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004720Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004721--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004722
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004723- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004724 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004725 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004726 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4727 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004728 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4729 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004730 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4731 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004732
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004733- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4734 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4735
4736- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4737 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4738
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004739Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004740-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004741
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004742- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4743 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4744 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4745 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4746 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4747 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4748 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4749 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4750
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004751- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4752 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4753 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4754 example).
4755
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004756- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004757 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004758 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004759 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004760
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004761- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4762 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4763 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004764 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004765
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004766- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4767 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4768 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4769 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4770 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4771 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4772
4773 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4774
4775 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4776
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004777Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004778-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004779
4780- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4781
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004782- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4783
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004784- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4785 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004786
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004787- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4788 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4789 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4790 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4791 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4792 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004793 attributes.
4794
4795- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4796 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4797 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004798
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004799- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4800 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4801 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004802
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004803- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4804 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4805 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004806 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4807 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4808
4809- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4810 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004811
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004812Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004813-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004814
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004815- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4816 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4817
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004818- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4819 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4820 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4821 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4822
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004823- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4824 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4825 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4826 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4827
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004828 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4829 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4830 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4831 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4832 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4833 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4834 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4835 without losing information).
4836
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004837- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004838 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4839 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4840 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4841 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4842 module).
4843
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004844 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004845 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4846 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4847 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4848 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004849
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004850- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004851 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4852 encoding.
4853
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004854- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4855 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4856
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004857- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004858 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4859
4860- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4861 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4862 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4863 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4864
4865- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4866
4867- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4868 ON, and OFF.
4869
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004870- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4871 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4872
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004873Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004874-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004875
4876- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4877 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4878 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004879
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004880- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4881 been added: -X and -E.
4882
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004883Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004884-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004885
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004886- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4887 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4888
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004889C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004890-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004891
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004892- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4893 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4894 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4895 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4896 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4897
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004898- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4899 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4900 as long) arguments.
4901
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004902- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4903 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4904 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4905 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4906 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4907 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4908
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004909- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4910 input.
4911
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004912New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004913-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004914
4915Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004916-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004917
4918Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004919-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004920
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004921- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4922 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4923 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4924
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004925- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4926 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4927 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004928 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004929
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004930 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4931 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4932 import signal
4933 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004934
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004935 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004936 while 1:
4937 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004938 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004939 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4940 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4941 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4942 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004943
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004944
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004945What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4946===========================
4947
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004948*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4949
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004950Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004951--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004952
4953- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4954 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4955 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4956
4957- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4958 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4959 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4960 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4961 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4962 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4963 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004964
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004965- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004966 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004967 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4968 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4969 associate a docstring with a property.
4970
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004971- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4972 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4973 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4974 other built-in object types.
4975
4976- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4977 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4978 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4979 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4980 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4981
4982- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4983 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4984
4985- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4986 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004987 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004988 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4989 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4990 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4991 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4992 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4993
4994- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4995 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4996 class.
4997
4998- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4999 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5000 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5001 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5002
5003- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5004 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5005 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5006 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5007
5008- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5009 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5010
5011- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5012 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5013 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5014 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5015 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005016 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005017 with the same value as s.
5018
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005019- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5020
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005021Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005022----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005023
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005024- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5025
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005026- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5027 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5028 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5029 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5030 objects.
5031
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005032- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5033 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005034 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5035 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5036
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005037- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5038 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5039 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5040
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005041Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005042-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005043
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005044- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5045 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5046 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5047 by the instances.
5048
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005049- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5050 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5051 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5052
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005053- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5054 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5055 before the entire comparison is complete.
5056
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005057- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5058 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5059 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5060
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005061- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5062 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5063 getwriter().
5064
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005065- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5066 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5067
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005068- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005069 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5070 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5071
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005072- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5073 iterable object.
5074
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005075- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5076 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005077
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005078- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5079 authentication.
5080
5081- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5082 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005083
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005084- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005085 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5086 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5087 a sample driver.)
5088
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005089Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005090-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005091
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005092- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5093 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5094 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5095 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5096 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5097 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5098 kernel has large file support.
5099
5100- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5101 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5102 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5103 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5104 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5105
5106- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5107 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5108 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5109
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005110C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005111-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005112
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005113- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5114 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5115
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005116New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005117-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005118
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005119- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5120 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5121
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005122Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005123-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005124
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005125- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5126 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5127 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5128 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5129 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5130
5131- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5132 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5133 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5134 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5135
5136- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5137 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5138
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005139Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005140-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005141
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005142- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005143 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5144 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005145
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005146
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005147What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5148===========================
5149
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005150*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5151
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005152Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005153----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005154
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005155- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5156 big to represent as a C double.
5157
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005158- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5159 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5160 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5161 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5162 restriction).
5163
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005164- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5165 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5166 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5167 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5168 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5169
5170 >>> dir([])
5171 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5172 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5173 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5174 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5175 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5176 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5177 'reverse', 'sort']
5178
5179 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5180
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005181- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005182 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5183 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5184 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5185 OverflowError exception.
5186
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005187- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005188 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005189 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5190 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5191 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5192 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5193 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005194 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005195 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5196 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5197
5198 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5199 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5200 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5201 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005202
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005203- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005204 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5205 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5206 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5207 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5208 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5209 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5210 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5211 once it is created.
5212
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005213- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5214 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5215 (key, value) pairs.
5216
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005217- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005218 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5219 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5220
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005221- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5222 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5223 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5224 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5225 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005226
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005227- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005228 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5229 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5230
5231 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5232
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005233- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005234 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5235
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005236Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005237-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005238
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005239- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005240 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5241 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005242
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005243- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5244 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5245 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5246 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5247 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5248 in this area anymore).
5249
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005250- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5251 threading.Timer.
5252
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005253- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5254 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5255
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005256- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005257 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5258
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005259- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005260 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5261 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5262 converted to Python longs.
5263
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005264- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005265 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5266
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005267- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5268 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5269 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5270
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005271Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005272-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005273
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005274- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5275 division operators as per PEP 238.
5276
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005277Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005278-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005279
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005280- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5281 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5282 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5283 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5284
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005285C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005286-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005287
5288- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005289
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005290- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5291 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005292 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005293
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005294 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5295 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005296 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005297 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005298
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005299- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005300 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5301 module:
5302
5303 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005304
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005305 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5306 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005307
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005308 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5309 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005310
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005311 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5312
5313 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5314
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005315- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005316 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5317 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5318 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005319
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005320New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005321-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005322
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005323- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5324 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5325 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5326 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5327 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005328
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005329Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005330-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005331
5332Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005333-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005334
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005335- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5336 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5337 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5338 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005339 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5340 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5341 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5342 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5343 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005344
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005345- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005346 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5347
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005348
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005349What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5350===========================
5351
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005352*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5353
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005354Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005355-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005356
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005357- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5358 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5359
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005360- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5361 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5362 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005363
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005364- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5365 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5366 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5367 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005368
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005369- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5370
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005371- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005372
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005373Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005374-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005375
5376- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005377 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005378 the module docstring for details.
5379
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005380Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005381-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005382
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005383- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005384 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5385 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5386 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005387
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005388- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5389 Nick Mathewson.
5390
5391Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005392----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005393
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005394- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5395 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5396 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5397 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5398 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5399 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5400 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5401 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5402
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005403- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5404 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5405 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5406 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5407
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005408- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5409 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5410 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5411 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5412 come a long way).
5413
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005414- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5415 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5416 write filters for these warnings).
5417
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005418- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5419 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5420 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5421 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5422 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5423
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005424- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5425 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5426 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5427 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5428 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5429 older distribution.
5430
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005431Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005432-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005433
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005434- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5435 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005436 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005437
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005438- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5439 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5440 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5441
5442- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5443
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005444- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5445
5446- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5447
5448- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5449
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005450- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005451
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005452- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5453
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005454New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005455-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005456
5457C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005458-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005459
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005460- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5461 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5462 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5463 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5464 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5465 against buffer overruns.
5466
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005467- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005468 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5469 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005470 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5471 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5472 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5473
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005474- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5475 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5476 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5477 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5478 deprecated.
5479
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005480Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005481-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005482
5483- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5484 relevant is found.
5485
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005486
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005487What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005488===========================
5489
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005490*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5491
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005492Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005493----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005494
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005495- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5496 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5497 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5498 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5499 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5500 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5501 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5502 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005503 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005504 repaired.
5505
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005506- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005507 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005508 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5509 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5510 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5511 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5512 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5513 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5514 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5515 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5516
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005517- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5518 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5519 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5520 leading BMO character).
5521
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005522- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5523 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5524 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5525
5526 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5527 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5528 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005529
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005530 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5531 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5532 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5533 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5534 for various simple to use conversions.
5535
5536 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5537 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5538
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005539 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5540 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5541 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5542 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5543 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5544 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5545 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5546 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5547 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5548 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5549 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5550 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5551 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5552 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5553 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005554
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005555- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5556 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5557 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005558 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005559 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005560
5561 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005562 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5563 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5564 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5565 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5566 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005567 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5568 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005569
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005570 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5571 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5572 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005573 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005574
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005575- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5576 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5577 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5578 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5579 floating arithmetic,
5580
5581 x = 9007199254740992.0
5582 print long(x)
5583
5584 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5585 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5586 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5587 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5588 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5589 functions are of good quality).
5590
5591 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5592 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5593 algorithms to break.
5594
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005595- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5596 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5597 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5598 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5599 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5600 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5601 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5602 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5603 order.
5604
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005605- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5606 operation along the most common code paths.
5607
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005608- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5609 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5610
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005611- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5612 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5613 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5614 {}.update(UserDict())
5615
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005616- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5617 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5618 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5619 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5620 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5621 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5622 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5623 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5624
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005625- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005626 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005627
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005628 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005629 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5630 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005631 join() method of strings
5632 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005633 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5634 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005635 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005636 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005637
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005638- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5639 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5640
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005641- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5642 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5643
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005644- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5645 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5646 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5647 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5648
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005649- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5650 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005651 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005652 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5653 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005654
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005655- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5656
5657
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005658Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005659-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005660
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005661- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005662 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005663 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5664 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5665
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005666- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5667 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5668
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005669- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5670 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5671 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5672 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5673
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005674- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5675 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5676 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5677
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005678- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5679
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005680- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5681
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005682- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5683 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5684 that are still imported into string.py).
5685
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005686- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5687
5688- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5689 Now it does.
5690
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005691- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5692
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005693- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5694 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5695 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5696 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5697 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005698 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5699 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005700
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005701- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5702 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5703 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5704 'help(object)'.
5705
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005706Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005707-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005708
5709- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005710 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005711 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5712 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5713
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005714- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005715 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5716 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005717
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005718C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005719-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005720
5721- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5722 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005723
5724----
5725
5726**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**