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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000015- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
16 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
17 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
18 length is not known).
19
20- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
21 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000022 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
23 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000024 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
25
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000026- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
27 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
28 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
29
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000030- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
31 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
32 cases.
33
34- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
35 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
36 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
37 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
38 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
39 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
40 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
41 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
42 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
43 a release build.
44
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +000045- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
46 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
47
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000048- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +000049 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000050
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000051- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
52 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
53 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
54 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
55 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
56 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
57 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
58 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
59 destroyed.
60
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +000061- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
62 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
63 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
64 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
65 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
66 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
67 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
68 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
69
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +000070- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
71 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
72 character other than a space.
73
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +000074- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
75 by the function object or by the method object, the function
76 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
77 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
78 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
79 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
80 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
81 attributes with the same name.
82
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000083- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
84 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
85 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
86 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
87 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
88 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
89 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
90 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
91 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
92 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
93 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
94 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
95 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
96 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +000097
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +000098- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
99 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
100 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
101 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
102 This has been repaired.
103
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000104- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
105
106- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
107
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000108- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
109 over a sequence.
110
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000111- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
112 from any iterable.
113
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000114- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
115
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000116- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
117 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
118 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
119 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
120 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
121 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
122 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
123 records with equal keys is unchanged).
124
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000125- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
126 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
127 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
128
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000129- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
130 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
131 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
132 freelist.
133
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000134- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
135 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
136
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000137- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
138 number.
139
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000140- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
141 a TypeError exception.
142
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000143- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
144 820195.
145
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000146- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
147 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
148 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
149
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000150- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
151 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
152 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000153
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000154- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
155 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
156 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
157
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000158Extension modules
159-----------------
160
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000161- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
162 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
163
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000164- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
165 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
166 and pops on either side of the deque.
167
168- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
169 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
170
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000171- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
172 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
173 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
174 other functions that expect a function argument.
175
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000176- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
177
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000178- os.getsid was added.
179
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000180- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
181 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
182 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
183
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000184- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
185
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000186- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
187
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000188- readline.clear_history was added.
189
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000190- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
191
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000192- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
193
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000194- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
195
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000196- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
197
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000198- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
199
200- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
201
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000202- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
203
204- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
205
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000206- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
207 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
208 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
209
210- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
211 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
212 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
213 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
214 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
215 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
216 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
217
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000218- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
219 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
220 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
221 the Unix uniq filter.
222
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000223- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
224 iterators from a single iterable.
225
226- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
227 of raising a TypeError exception.
228
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000229- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
230 as parameter.
231
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000232Library
233-------
234
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000235- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
236 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
237 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
238 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
239 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
240 accordingly.
241
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000242- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
243 decoding standards.
244
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000245- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
246 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
247 called for all requests.
248
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000249- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
250 they are passed to the compiler.
251
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000252- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
253 indent, width and depth.
254
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000255- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
256 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
257
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000258- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
259 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
260
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000261- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
262
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000263- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
264
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000265- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
266
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000267- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
268 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
269
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000270- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
271 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000272
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000273- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
274 a string).
275
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000276- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
277
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000278- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
279
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000280- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
281
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000282- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
283
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000284- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
285 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
286 list of fieldnames.
287
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000288- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
289 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
290
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000291- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
292
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000293- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
294 empty lists.
295
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000296- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
297 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
298 and shelves.
299
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000300- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
301 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
302
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000303- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000304 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
305 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000306
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000307- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
308 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000309 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000310
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000311- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000312 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
313 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
314
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000315- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
316 and removed in Py2.4.
317
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000318- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
319
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000320- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
321
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000322Tools/Demos
323-----------
324
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000325- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
326 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
327
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000328- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
329
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000330- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
331 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
332 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
333 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
334
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000335- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
336
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000337- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
338 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
339 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
340 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
341 now.
342
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000343- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
344 in effect
345
346- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
347 C-c C-h
348
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000349- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
350 -d option was given.
351
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000352Build
353-----
354
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000355- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
356 removed.
357
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000358- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
359 supported (see PEP 11).
360
361- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
362
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000363- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
364
365- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
366 (see PEP 11).
367
368- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
369 sizeof(char) must be 1.
370
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000371C API
372-----
373
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000374- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
375 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
376 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
377 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
378 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
379
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000380- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
381 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
382 about 10% faster.
383
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000384- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
385 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
386
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000387- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
388 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
389 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
390 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
391
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000392New platforms
393-------------
394
395Tests
396-----
397
398Windows
399-------
400
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000401- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
402 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
403 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
404 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
405
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000406- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
407 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
408 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
409
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000410Mac
411----
412
413
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000414What's New in Python 2.3 final?
415===============================
416
417*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
418
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000419IDLE
420----
421
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000422- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
423 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
424 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
425 context-menu actions.
426
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000427- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
428 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
429 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
430 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
431 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
432 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
433 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
434 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
435 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
436
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000437
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000438What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
439=============================================
440
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000441*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000442
443Core and builtins
444-----------------
445
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000446- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000447 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000448 comment at the end are still unsupported.
449
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000450Extension modules
451-----------------
452
453- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
454 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
455 than once. This has been fixed.
456
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000457- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
458 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
459 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
460 call.
461
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000462- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
463
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000464Library
465-------
466
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000467- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
468 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
469
470- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
471 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
472 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
473 restored.
474
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000475IDLE
476----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000477
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000478- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000479
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000480Build
481-----
482
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000483- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
484 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
485
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000486C API
487-----
488
489Windows
490-------
491
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000492- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
493 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
494
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000495- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
496
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000497Mac
498---
499
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000500- Various fixes to pimp.
501
502- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
503
504- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
505 more problems than it solves.
506
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000507
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000508What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
509=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000510
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000511*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
512
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000513Core and builtins
514-----------------
515
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000516- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
517 by sys.setcheckinterval().
518
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000519- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
520 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000521 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000522
523- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
524 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
525 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000526 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000527
528- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
529 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000530
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000531- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
532 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
533 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
534
535- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000536 770247.
537
538- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000539
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000540Extension modules
541-----------------
542
543- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
544 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
545
546- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
547
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000548- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
549
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000550- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
551 contained within the _strptime module.
552
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000553- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
554 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
555
556- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000557 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
558
559- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
560 the find_class attribute, if present.
561
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000562- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000563
564 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
565 (SF bug 763298).
566
567 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000568 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
569 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
570 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000571
572 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
573
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000574Library
575-------
576
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000577- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
578
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000579- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
580 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
581 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
582 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
583 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
584 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
585 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
586 or Tester().
587
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000588- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
589 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
590 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
591 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
592 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
593 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
594 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
595 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
596 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000597
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000598 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000599
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000600- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
601 weren't before was an oversight.
602
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000603- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
604 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
605
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000606- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
607 when there are no lines.
608
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000609- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
610 which could occur with Tk 8.4
611
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000612- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
613 to child processes.
614
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000615- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
616
617- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
618
619- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
620 xmlrpclib.
621
622- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
623 responses.
624
625- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
626 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
627
628- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
629 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
630 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
631
632- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
633 used as patterns.
634
635- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
636 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
637 than Tk 8.3.
638
639- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
640
641- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000642
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000643Tools/Demos
644-----------
645
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000646- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
647
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000648- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
649
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000650- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000651
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000652Build
653-----
654
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000655- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
656
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000657- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
658
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000659- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
660 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000661
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000662- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
663 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
664 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000665
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000666C API
667-----
668
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000669- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
670 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
671
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000672Windows
673-------
674
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000675- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
676 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
677 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
678 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
679 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
680 Python exception ::
681
682 thread.error: can't start new thread
683
684 is raised now.
685
686- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
687 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
688 instead of from DLL teardown.
689
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000690Mac
691---
692
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000693- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000694 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000695 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
696 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
697 the executable in the bundle.
698
699- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000700
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000701- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
702
703- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
704 on Panther.
705
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000706What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
707================================
708
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000709*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000710
711Core and builtins
712-----------------
713
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000714- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
715 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
716 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
717 with the -i option.
718
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000719- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
720 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
721
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000722- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
723 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
724
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000725- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
726 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
727 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
728 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
729 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
730 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
731 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
732 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
733 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
734 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
735 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
736 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
737 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000738
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000739- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
740 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
741 embedded in a lambda expression.
742
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000743- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
744 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
745 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
746 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
747 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
748
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000749- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
750 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
751 matches the restriction on classic classes.
752
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000753- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
754 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
755
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000756- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
757 It's writable again.
758
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000759- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
760 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
761 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000762 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000763
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000764- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
765 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
766 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
767
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000768Extension modules
769-----------------
770
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000771- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
772 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
773
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000774- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
775 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
776 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
777 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
778
779- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
780 collection.
781
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000782- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
783 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
784 unique within a single program run.
785
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000786- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
787 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
788
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000789- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
790 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
791
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000792- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
793 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000794
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000795- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
796
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000797- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
798 Fixes SF bug #730685.
799
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000800- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
801 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
802 for many BSD-derived systems.
803
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000804
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000805Library
806-------
807
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000808- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
809 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
810 primary ones:
811
812 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
813 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
814 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
815
816 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
817 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
818 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
819 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
820 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
821 framework features (which doctest lacks).
822
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000823- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
824 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
825 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
826 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
827 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
828 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
829 argument.
830
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000831- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
832 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
833 in the archive.
834
835- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
836 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
837
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000838- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
839 569574).
840
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000841- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
842 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
843 no more.
844
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000845- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
846 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
847 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
848 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
849 code coverage.
850
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000851- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
852 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
853 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000854 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
855 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000856
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000857- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
858 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
859 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000860 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000861
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000862- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
863
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000864- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
865 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
866 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
867 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
868
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000869- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
870 handling.
871
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000872- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
873 __doc__ of data descriptors.
874
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000875- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
876 in socket.py.
877
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000878- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
879
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000880- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
881 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
882 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
883 opener with proxy support.
884
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000885- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
886
887- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
888
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000889Tools/Demos
890-----------
891
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000892- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
893
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000894- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
895
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000896- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
897 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000898
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000899- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
900 files.
901
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000902Build
903-----
904
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000905- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000906 different root directory.
907
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000908C API
909-----
910
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000911- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
912 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
913 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
914 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
915 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
916 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
917 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
918 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
919 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
920 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
921
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000922- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
923 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
924 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
925 from Python.
926
927
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000928New platforms
929-------------
930
931None this time.
932
933Tests
934-----
935
936- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
937 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
938
939Windows
940-------
941
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000942- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
943
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000944- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
945 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
946 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
947 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
948 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
949 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
950 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
951 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
952 that's what it's for.
953
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000954Mac
955---
956
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000957- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
958 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
959 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
960 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000961- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
962 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
963- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000964
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000965SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
966------------------------------------
967
968430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
969598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
970622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
971661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
972683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
973697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
974713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
975724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
976727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
977729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
978730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
979731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
980732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
981733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
982735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
983740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
984744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
985745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
986747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
987749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
988751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
989753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
990755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
991757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
992760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
993
994
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000995What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
996================================
997
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000998*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000999
1000Core and builtins
1001-----------------
1002
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001003- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1004 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1005
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001006- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1007 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1008 and cannot be strings).
1009
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001010- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1011 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1012 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1013 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1014
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001015- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1016 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1017 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1018 Python itself.
1019
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001020- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1021 the referenced object, if it has one.
1022
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001023- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1024 the thread started at
1025 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1026
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001027- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1028 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1029 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1030 placed on a list index.
1031
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001032- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1033 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1034 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1035 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1036
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001037- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1038 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1039 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1040 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1041 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1042 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1043 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1044
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001045- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1046 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1047 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1048 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1049 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1050
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001051- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1052 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001053
1054- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1055 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1056 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1057 #693195.)
1058
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001059- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1060 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001061
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001062- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001063 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001064 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1065 interpreter executions, would fail.
1066
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001067- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001068 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001069 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001070
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001071Extension modules
1072-----------------
1073
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001074- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1075 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1076 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1077 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1078
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001079- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1080 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1081
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001082- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1083 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1084 and Greg Chapman.)
1085
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001086- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1087 recursively.
1088
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001089- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001090 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1091 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1092 leaks.
1093
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001094- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1095
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001096- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1097 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1098 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1099 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1100 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1101 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1102 #705836.
1103
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001104- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001105 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1106
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001107- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1108 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1109 See SF bug #692416.
1110
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001111- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1112 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1113
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001114- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1115 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1116 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001117
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001118- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001119 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1120 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1121
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001122- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1123 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1124 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1125 timeouts to work properly.
1126
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001127Library
1128-------
1129
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001130- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1131 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1132 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1133 future release.
1134
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001135- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1136 for querying platform dependent features.
1137
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001138- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001139
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001140- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1141 pickle protocol versions.
1142
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001143- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1144 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1145 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1146
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001147- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1148
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001149- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1150 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1151 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1152 modules.
1153
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001154- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1155 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1156 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1157
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001158- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1159 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1160
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001161- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1162 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1163 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1164
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001165- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001166 MS Office extensions.
1167
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001168- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1169 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1170
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001171- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1172 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1173
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001174- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1175 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1176 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1177 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1178 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1179 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1180
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001181- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1182 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1183 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001184
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001185- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1186 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1187 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1188
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001189- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1190
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001191- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1192 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1193 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1194
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001195Tools/Demos
1196-----------
1197
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001198- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1199 See the module docstring for details.
1200
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001201Build
1202-----
1203
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001204- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1205 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001206
1207C API
1208-----
1209
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001210- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1211
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001212- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1213 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1214 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1215
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001216- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1217 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001218
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001219 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1220 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1221 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001222
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001223- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001224 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1225
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001226- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1227 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1228 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001229
1230New platforms
1231-------------
1232
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001233None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001234
1235Tests
1236-----
1237
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001238- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1239 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001240
1241Windows
1242-------
1243
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001244- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1245 function.
1246
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001247- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1248 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001249
1250Mac
1251---
1252
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001253- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1254 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001255
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001256- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1257 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001258
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001259- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1260 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1261 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001262
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001263- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001264 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1265 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001266
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001267- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1268 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001269
1270
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001271What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1272=================================
1273
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001274*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001275
1276Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001277-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001278
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001279- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1280 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1281 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1282
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001283- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1284 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1285 (SF patch #664376.)
1286
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001287- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1288 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1289 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1290 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1291 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1292 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001293 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001294
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001295- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1296 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1297 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1298 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001299 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001300
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001301- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1302 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1303 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1304 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1305 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1306 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1307 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1308 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1309 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1310 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1311 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1312
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001313- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1314 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1315 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1316 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1317 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1318 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1319
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001320- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1321 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1322
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001323- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1324 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1325 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1326 case.)
1327
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001328- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1329 passed as unicode strings.
1330
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001331- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1332 See SF bug #683467.
1333
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001334- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1335 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1336
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001337- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1338
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001339- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1340
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001341- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1342 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1343 arguments.
1344
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001345- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1346 See SF bug #667147.
1347
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001348- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001349 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001350 See SF bug #676155.
1351
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001352- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001353 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001354 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1355 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1356 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1357 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1358 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1359 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001360
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001361Extension modules
1362-----------------
1363
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001364- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1365 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1366 tp_as_number pointer.
1367
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001368- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1369 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1370 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1371 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1372 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1373
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001374- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1375
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001376- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1377
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001378- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001379 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001380 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1381 patch #678531.)
1382
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001383- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1384 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1385
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001386- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1387 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1388
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001389- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1390
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001391- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1392 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1393 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1394
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001395- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1396
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001397- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1398 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1399
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001400- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001401
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001402- datetime changes:
1403
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001404 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1405
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001406 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1407 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1408 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1409 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1410 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1411 now.
1412
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001413 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001414 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1415 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001416
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001417 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001418 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001419 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1420 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1421 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1422 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001423
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001424 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1425 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1426 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001427 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1428
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001429 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1430 by a later example coded by Guido.
1431
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001432 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001433 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1434 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1435 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001436 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1437 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1438
1439 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1440 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1441 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1442 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1443 tzinfo subclass instance.
1444
1445 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1446 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1447 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1448 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1449 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1450 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1451 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1452 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001453
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001454 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1455 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1456 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1457 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1458 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001459 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1460
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001461 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001462
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001463 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1464 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1465 as a naive datetime object.
1466
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001467 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1468 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1469 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1470
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001471 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1472 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1473 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1474 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1475 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1476 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1477 comparison.
1478
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001479 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1480 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1481 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1482 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001483 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001484
1485 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001486
1487 and ::
1488
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001489 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1490
1491 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1492 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1493 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1494 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1495
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001496 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1497 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1498 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1499 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1500 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1501
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001502 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1503 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001504 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1505 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001506
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001507Library
1508-------
1509
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001510- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1511 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1512
1513- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1514 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1515 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1516 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1517 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1518 See PEP 307 for details.
1519
1520- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1521 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1522
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001523- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1524 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001525 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001526 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1527 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001528 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001529
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001530- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1531 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1532
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001533- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1534 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1535 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1536
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001537- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1538
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001539- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1540 exception.
1541
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001542- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1543 class.
1544
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001545- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1546 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1547 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1548
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001549- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1550 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1551
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001552- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001553 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1554 See SF bug #659228.
1555
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001556- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1557 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1558 See SF patch #651082.
1559
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001560- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001561
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001562- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1563 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1564
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001565- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001566 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001567
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001568- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1569 DOS paths from other platforms.
1570
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001571Tools/Demos
1572-----------
1573
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001574- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1575 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1576 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1577 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1578 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1579 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1580 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1581 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1582 example:
1583
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001584 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1585 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001586
1587 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1588
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001589
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001590Build
1591-----
1592
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001593- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1594 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1595 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001596 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1597
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001598 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1599
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001600- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1601 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1602 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1603 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1604 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1605 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1606 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1607 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1608 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1609
1610- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1611 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1612 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1613 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1614
1615- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1616 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1617
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001618C API
1619-----
1620
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001621- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1622 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001623
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001624- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1625 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1626 tp_as_number pointer.
1627
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001628- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1629 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1630 (SF #681367)
1631
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001632- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1633 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1634 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1635 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001636
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001637Tests
1638-----
1639
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001640- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001641 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1642 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1643 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1644 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1645 pydoc.)
1646
1647- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1648
1649- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001650
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001651Windows
1652-------
1653
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001654- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1655 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1656 time).
1657
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001658- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1659 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1660
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001661- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1662 release without strong cryptography.
1663
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001664- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001665 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001666
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001667- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1668 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1669
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001670Mac
1671---
1672
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001673- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1674 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001675
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001676- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1677 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1678 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001679
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001680- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1681 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001682
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001683- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1684 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1685 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1686 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001687
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001688- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001689 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1690 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1691 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001692
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001693
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001694What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001695=================================
1696
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001697*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001698
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001699Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001700--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001701
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001702- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1703
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001704- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1705 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001706 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001707 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001708 a different meaning than before.
1709
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001710- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001711 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001712 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001713
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001714- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001715 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001716 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001717
1718- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1719 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1720 and deallocation.
1721
1722- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1723 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1724
1725- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1726 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1727 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1728 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1729 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1730
1731- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1732 now detected by the garbage collector.
1733
1734- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1735 [SF bug 519621]
1736
1737- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1738 identifier.
1739
1740- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1741 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1742 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1743 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1744 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1745 [SF bug 563060]
1746
1747- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1748 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1749 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1750 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1751 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1752
1753- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1754 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1755 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1756
1757- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1758
1759- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1760 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1761 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1762 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1763 state of the slots would be lost.)
1764
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001765Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001766-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001767
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001768- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001769 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1770 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1771 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1772 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001773 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1774 Jython 2.1.
1775
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001776- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001777 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001778 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1779 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1780 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1781 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1782 these, see PEP 302.
1783
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001784- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1785 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1786 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1787
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001788- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1789 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1790 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1791
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001792- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1793 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1794 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1795
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001796- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1797 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1798 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1799 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1800 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1801 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1802 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1803 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1804 releases or implementations.
1805
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001806- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001807 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1808 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001809
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001810- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1811 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1812
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001813- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1814 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1815 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1816
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001817- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1818 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1819
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001820- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1821 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001822 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1823 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001824
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001825- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1826 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1827 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1828 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1829 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1830
1831 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1832 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1833 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1834 pattern.
1835
1836 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1837 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1838 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1839 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1840
1841 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1842 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1843 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1844 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1845 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1846 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1847
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001848- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1849 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1850 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1851 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1852 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1853 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1854 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1855 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001856
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001857- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1858 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1859 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1860 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1861 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001862 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1863 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1864 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1865 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1866 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1867 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1868 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001869
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001870- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1871 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1872
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001873- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1874 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1875 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1876 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1877 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1878 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1879 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1880 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1881 to Zack Weinberg!
1882
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001883- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1884 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1885 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1886 type. This has been fixed now.
1887
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001888- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1889 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1890 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1891
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001892- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1893 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1894 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1895 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1896 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1897 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1898 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1899 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001900 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001901
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001902- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1903 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1904 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001905
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001906- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1907 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1908 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1909 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1910 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1911 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1912 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1913 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001914 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001915 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1916 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1917
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001918- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1919 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1920 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1921 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1922 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1923 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1924 this.)
1925
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001926- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1927 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001928 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001929 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001930 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1931 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001932 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1933 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001934
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001935- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1936 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1937 currently running.
1938
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001939- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1940 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1941 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1942 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1943
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001944- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1945 as directory names.
1946
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001947- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1948 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1949
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001950- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1951 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1952
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001953- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001954 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1955 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001956
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001957- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1958 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1959 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1960 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1961 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1962
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001963- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1964 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1965 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1966 removed.
1967
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001968- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1969 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1970 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1971
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001972- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1973 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1974 to __debug__.
1975
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001976- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1977 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1978 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1979
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001980- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1981 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1982 deprecated now.
1983
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001984- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1985 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1986 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001987
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001988- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1989 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1990 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1991 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1992 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001993
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001994- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1995 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1996
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001997- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1998 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1999 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002000 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002001 is backward compatible.
2002
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002003- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2004 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2005 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2006 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2007 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2008
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002009- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2010 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2011 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2012 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2013 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2014 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002015
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002016- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2017 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2018
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002019- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2020 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2021
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002022- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2023 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2024 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2025 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2026 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2027
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002028- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2029 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2030 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2031
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002032- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002033 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2034
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002035- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2036 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2037 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002038
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002039- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2040 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2041
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002042- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2043 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2044 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2045
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002046- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2047
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002048Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002049-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002050
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002051- Added three operators to the operator module:
2052 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2053 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2054 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2055
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002056- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2057
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002058- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2059 archives.
2060
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002061- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2062 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2063 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2064
2065 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2066
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002067- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2068 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2069 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002070 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002071
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002072- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2073 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2074 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2075 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002076 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2077 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2078 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2079 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002080
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002081- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2082 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002083
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002084- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2085
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002086- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2087 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2088
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002089- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2090 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2091 supported.
2092
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002093- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2094
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002095- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2096 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002097
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002098- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2099 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2100
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002101- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2102
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002103- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2104 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2105
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002106- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2107 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2108 functions but callable type objects.
2109
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002110- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002111 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002112 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002113
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002114- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2115 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002116
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002117- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2118 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002119
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002120- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2121 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2122 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2123 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2124
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002125- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2126 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002127
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002128- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2129 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2130 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2131 and __imul__.
2132
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002133- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002134 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2135 is called.
2136
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002137- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2138 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2139 interpreter was compiled.
2140
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002141- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2142 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2143 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002144 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002145 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2146 1, not 2.
2147
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002148- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2149 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2150 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2151 limit.
2152
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002153- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2154 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2155 bug #623464.
2156
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002157- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2158 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2159 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2160 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2161
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002162Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002163-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002164
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002165- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2166
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002167- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2168 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2169 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2170 with Python 2.3a2.
2171
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002172- os.path exposes getctime.
2173
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002174- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002175 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002176 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002177 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002178 unit tests of floating point results.
2179
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002180- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2181 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2182 has been increased.
2183
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002184- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2185 executed.
2186
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002187- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2188 postinstallation script.
2189
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002190- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2191 test the current module.
2192
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002193- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002194 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2195 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2196 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2197 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2198
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002199- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002200 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002201 Ward's Optik package.
2202
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002203- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2204 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2205 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2206 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2207
2208- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2209 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002210 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002211
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002212- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2213 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2214 shelf are binary pickles.
2215
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002216- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2217 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2218
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002219- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2220 modules are iterators now.
2221
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002222- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2223 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2224 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2225 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2226 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2227 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002228
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002229- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2230 with their entity value.
2231
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002232- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2233
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002234- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2235 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002236
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002237- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2238 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002239 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002240
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002241- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2242 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2243 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2244 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2245 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2246 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2247 main():
2248
2249 import locale
2250 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2251
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002252- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2253 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2254
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002255- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2256 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2257 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2258 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2259 to the new standard.
2260
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002261- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2262 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2263 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2264 an extension to the database.
2265
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002266- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2267 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2268 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2269 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002270 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002271
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002272- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002273 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002274
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002275- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2276 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2277 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2278 bounded integers.
2279
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002280- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2281 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2282 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2283 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2284 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2285 in existence.
2286
2287 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2288 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2289 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2290 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2291 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2292 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2293
2294 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2295 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2296 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2297 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2298
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002299- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2300 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2301 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2302
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002303- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2304
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002305- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2306 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2307 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2308 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2309
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002310- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2311 argument.
2312
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002313- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2314 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2315 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2316 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2317 [SF patch 560794].
2318
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002319- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2320 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2321 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002322 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2323 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2324 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002325
2326- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2327 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002328
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002329- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2330 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2331 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2332 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002333
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002334- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2335 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2336 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2337 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2338 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2339
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002340- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002341
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002342- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2343
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002344- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2345 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2346 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2347 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2348 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2349 identical to None.
2350
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002351- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2352 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2353 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2354 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2355 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2356 results now.
2357
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002358- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2359 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2360
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002361- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2362 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2363 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2364 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2365 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2366 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2367 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2368 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2369
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002370- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2371
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002372- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2373 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2374
2375- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2376 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2377 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2378 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2379 and other systems.
2380
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002381- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2382 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2383 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2384 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 +00002385 work well with these.
2386
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002387- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2388
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002389- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002390 connections.
2391
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002392- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2393 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2394 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2395
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002396- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2397 sets
2398
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002399- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2400 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2401 name.
2402
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002403- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2404 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2405 passed in.
2406
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002407- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002408 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002409 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2410 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002411
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002412- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2413
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002414- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2415
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002416- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2417 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2418 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2419
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002420- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2421 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2422 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2423 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002424 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002425
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002426- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002427 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002428 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002429
2430- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2431 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2432 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2433
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002434- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002435 the value of its expression argument.
2436
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002437- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2438 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2439 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2440
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002441- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2442 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2443 skipstone browser was included.
2444
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002445- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2446 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2447
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002448Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002449-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002450
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002451- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2452 names in addition to accepting file names.
2453
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002454- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2455 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2456 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2457 still used and useful.)
2458
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002459- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2460 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2461 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2462 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002463
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002464- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2465 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2466 the generated binary.
2467
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002468Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002469-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002470
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002471- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2472
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002473- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2474 except in the hands of experts.
2475
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002476- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002477 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2478 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2479 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002480
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002481- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2482 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2483 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2484 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2485 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2486 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2487 builds.
2488
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002489- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2490 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2491 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2492 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2493 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2494 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2495 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2496 new type.
2497
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002498- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002499
2500 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2501 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2502 positive infinities.
2503
2504 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2505 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2506 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2507 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2508 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2509 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2510 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2511
2512 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2513
2514 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2515
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002516- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2517 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2518 size of the executable.
2519
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002520- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2521 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2522 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2523 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002524
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002525- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2526
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002527- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2528 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2529 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002530
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002531- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2532 well as Unix.
2533
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002534- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2535 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2536 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2537 modules in the README file for details.
2538
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002539C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002540-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002541
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002542- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2543 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002544 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002545 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002546 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002547
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002548- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2549 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2550 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2551 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2552 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2553 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002554 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002555 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2556 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2557 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2558 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2559 aligned.)
2560
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002561- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2562 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2563 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2564
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002565- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2566 level.
2567
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002568- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2569 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2570 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2571 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2572 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2573
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002574- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2575 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2576 code.
2577
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002578- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2579 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2580 adjusting for negative indices.
2581
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002582- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2583 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2584 object.
2585
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002586- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2587 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2588 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2589
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002590- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2591 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002592
2593- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2594
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002595- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2596 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2597 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2598 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2599
2600- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2601
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002602- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002603
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002604- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002605 without going through the buffer API.
2606
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002607- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002608
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002609- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2610 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2611 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2612 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2613
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002614- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2615 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2616
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002617- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002618 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2619
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002620New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002621-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002622
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002623- OpenVMS is now supported.
2624
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002625- AtheOS is now supported.
2626
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002627- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2628
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002629- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2630
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002631Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002632-----
2633
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002634- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2635 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2636 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002637
2638Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002639-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002640
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002641- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2642 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2643 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2644 bugs.
2645 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002646 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002647 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2648 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002649 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002650
2651- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002652 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002653
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002654- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2655 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2656
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002657- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2658 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002659 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002660 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2661
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002662- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2663 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2664 use files" uninstall option).
2665
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002666- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2667
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002668- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2669 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2670
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002671- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2672 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2673 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2674
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002675- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2676 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2677 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2678 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2679 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002680 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2681 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2682 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002683
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002684- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002685 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002686 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2687 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2688 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2689 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2690 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2691 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2692 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2693 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2694 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2695 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2696 work around.
2697
2698- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2699 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2700 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2701 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2702 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2703 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2704 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2705 specified with O_CREAT too).
2706
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002707Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002708----
2709
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002710- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002711
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002712- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2713 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2714 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2715
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002716- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2717 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2718 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2719
2720- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2721 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2722 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2723 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2724 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2725 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2726 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2727 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002728
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002729- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2730 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2731 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002732
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002733- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2734 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2735 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2736 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2737 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002738
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002739- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2740 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2741 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002742
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002743- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2744 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002745
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002746- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2747 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2748 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2749 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2750 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002751
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002752- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2753 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2754 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2755
2756- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2757 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2758 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002759
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002760- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2761 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2762 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2763 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002764 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002765
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002766- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2767 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002768
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002769- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2770 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002771
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002772- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002773 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002774 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2775 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002776
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002777
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002778What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002779===============================
2780
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002781*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2782
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002783Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002784--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002785
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002786- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2787 with a custom metaclass.
2788
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002789Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002790-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002791
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002792- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2793 are proxies.
2794
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002795Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002796-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002797
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002798- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2799 very short strings.
2800
2801- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2802 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2803 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2804 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2805 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2806
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002807Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002808-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002809
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002810- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2811 close or delete time).
2812
2813- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2814 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2815
2816- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2817
2818- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002819 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002820
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002821Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002822-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002823
2824Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002825-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002826
2827C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002828-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002829
2830New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002831-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002832
2833Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002834-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002835
2836Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002837-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002838
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002839- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2840
2841- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2842 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2843
2844- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2845 deleted at process exit time.
2846
2847- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2848 in backslash.
2849
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002850Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002851----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002852
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002853- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2854 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2855 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2856
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002857
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002858What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002859===========================
2860
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002861*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2862
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002863Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002864--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002865
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002866- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2867 been extensively updated. See
2868
2869 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2870
2871 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2872
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002873- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2874 deleted!
2875
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002876- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2877 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2878 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2879 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2880 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2881
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002882- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2883
2884 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2885 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2886
2887 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2888 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2889 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2890 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2891 supported anyway.
2892
2893 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2894 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2895
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002896- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2897 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2898 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2899 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2900 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002901
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002902- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2903 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2904 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2905
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002906Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002907-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002908
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002909- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2910 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2911 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2912 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2913 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2914 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002915 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2916 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2917 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2918 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002919
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002920- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2921 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2922 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2923
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002924Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002925-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002926
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002927- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2928
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002929Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002930-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002931
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002932- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2933 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2934 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2935 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2936 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2937 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2938
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002939- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2940
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002941- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2942
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002943- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2944
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002945- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2946 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2947 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2948
2949- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2950
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002951Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002952-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002953
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002954- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2955 off a search on Google.
2956
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002957Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002958-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002959
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002960- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2961 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2962 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2963 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2964 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2965 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2966 other platforms should do likewise.
2967
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002968- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2969 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2970 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2971
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002972C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002973-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002974
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002975- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2976 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2977 producing key-value pairs.
2978
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002979- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002980 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002981 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2982 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2983 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2984 previously went unchallenged.
2985
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002986New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002987-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002988
2989Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002990-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002991
2992Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002993-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002994
2995Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002996----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002997
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002998- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2999 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003000
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003001- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3002 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3003 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3004 home.
3005
3006
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003007What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003008===========================
3009
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003010*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3011
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003012Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003013--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003014
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003015- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3016 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003017
3018 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003019 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003020
3021 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3022 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003023 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003024 This needs to be documented.
3025
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003026- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3027 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3028
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003029- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3030 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3031 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3032
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003033- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3034 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3035
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003036- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3037 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3038 class forbids it).
3039
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003040- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3041 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3042 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3043
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003044- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3045
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003046Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003047-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003048
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003049- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3050 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003051 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003052
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003053- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3054 (like 1 + '').
3055
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003056Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003057-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003058
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003059- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3060 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3061 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3062 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003063 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003064 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3065
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003066- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3067 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3068 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3069 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3070
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003071- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3072 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003073 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3074 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3075 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003076
3077- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3078 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003079
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003080- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3081 bytes on its input.
3082
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003083Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003084-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003085
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003086- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003087 convenience function.
3088
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003089- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3090 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3091 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003092 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3093 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3094 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3095 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3096 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3097 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003098
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003099- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3100 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3101 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3102 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3103
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003104- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3105 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3106 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3107
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003108- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3109 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3110 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3111 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3112
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003113- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3114 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003115 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003116 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3117 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3118 new -l and -e options.
3119
3120- statcache is now deprecated.
3121
3122- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3123 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003124 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003125 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3126 time properly taken into account.
3127
3128- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3129 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3130 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3131 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3132
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003133Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003134-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003135
3136Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003137-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003138
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003139- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3140 is built with libdb3 if available.
3141
3142- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3143
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003144C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003145-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003146
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003147- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3148 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3149 PySequence_Size().
3150
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003151- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3152
3153- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3154 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3155 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3156
3157- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3158 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3159
3160- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3161 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3162
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003163New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003164-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003165
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003166- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3167 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3168
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003169- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3170 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3171
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003172- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3173
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003174Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003175-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003176
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003177- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3178 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3179
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003180Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003181-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003182
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003183Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003184----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003185
3186- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3187 removed completely in the next release.
3188
3189- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3190 OSX.
3191
3192- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3193 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3194
3195- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3196
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003197
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003198What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003199===========================
3200
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003201*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3202
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003203Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003204--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003205
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003206- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003207 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003208 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003209 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3210 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003211 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3212 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003213 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3214 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003215
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003216- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3217 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3218
3219- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3220 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3221
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003222Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003223-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003224
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003225- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3226 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3227 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3228 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3229 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3230 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3231 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3232 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3233
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003234- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3235 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3236 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3237 example).
3238
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003239- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003240 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003241 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003242 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003243
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003244- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3245 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3246 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003247 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003248
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003249- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3250 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3251 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3252 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3253 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3254 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3255
3256 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3257
3258 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3259
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003260Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003261-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003262
3263- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3264
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003265- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3266
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003267- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3268 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003269
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003270- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3271 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3272 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3273 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3274 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3275 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003276 attributes.
3277
3278- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3279 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3280 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003281
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003282- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3283 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3284 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003285
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003286- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3287 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3288 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003289 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3290 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3291
3292- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3293 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003294
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003295Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003296-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003297
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003298- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3299 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3300
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003301- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3302 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3303 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3304 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3305
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003306- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3307 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3308 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3309 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3310
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003311 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3312 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3313 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3314 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3315 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3316 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3317 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3318 without losing information).
3319
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003320- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003321 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3322 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3323 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3324 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3325 module).
3326
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003327 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003328 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3329 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3330 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3331 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003332
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003333- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003334 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3335 encoding.
3336
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003337- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3338 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3339
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003340- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003341 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3342
3343- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3344 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3345 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3346 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3347
3348- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3349
3350- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3351 ON, and OFF.
3352
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003353- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3354 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3355
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003356Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003357-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003358
3359- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3360 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3361 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003362
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003363- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3364 been added: -X and -E.
3365
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003366Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003367-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003368
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003369- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3370 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3371
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003372C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003373-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003374
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003375- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3376 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3377 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3378 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3379 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3380
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003381- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3382 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3383 as long) arguments.
3384
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003385- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3386 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3387 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3388 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3389 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3390 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3391
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003392- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3393 input.
3394
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003395New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003396-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003397
3398Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003399-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003400
3401Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003402-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003403
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003404- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3405 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3406 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3407
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003408- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3409 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3410 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003411 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003412
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003413 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3414 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3415 import signal
3416 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003417
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003418 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003419 while 1:
3420 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003421 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003422 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3423 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3424 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3425 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003426
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003427
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003428What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3429===========================
3430
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003431*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3432
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003433Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003434--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003435
3436- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3437 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3438 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3439
3440- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3441 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3442 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3443 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3444 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3445 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3446 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003447
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003448- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003449 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003450 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3451 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3452 associate a docstring with a property.
3453
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003454- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3455 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3456 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3457 other built-in object types.
3458
3459- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3460 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3461 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3462 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3463 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3464
3465- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3466 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3467
3468- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3469 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003470 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003471 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3472 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3473 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3474 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3475 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3476
3477- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3478 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3479 class.
3480
3481- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3482 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3483 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3484 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3485
3486- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3487 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3488 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3489 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3490
3491- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3492 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3493
3494- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3495 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3496 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3497 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3498 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003499 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003500 with the same value as s.
3501
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003502- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3503
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003504Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003505----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003506
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003507- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3508
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003509- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3510 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3511 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3512 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3513 objects.
3514
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003515- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3516 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003517 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3518 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3519
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003520- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3521 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3522 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3523
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003524Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003525-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003526
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003527- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3528 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3529 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3530 by the instances.
3531
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003532- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3533 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3534 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3535
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003536- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3537 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3538 before the entire comparison is complete.
3539
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003540- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3541 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3542 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3543
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003544- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3545 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3546 getwriter().
3547
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003548- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3549 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3550
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003551- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003552 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3553 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3554
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003555- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3556 iterable object.
3557
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003558- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3559 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003560
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003561- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3562 authentication.
3563
3564- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3565 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003566
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003567- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003568 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3569 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3570 a sample driver.)
3571
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003572Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003573-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003574
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003575- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3576 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3577 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3578 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3579 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3580 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3581 kernel has large file support.
3582
3583- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3584 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3585 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3586 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3587 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3588
3589- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3590 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3591 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3592
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003593C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003594-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003595
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003596- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3597 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3598
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003599New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003600-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003601
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003602- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3603 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3604
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003605Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003606-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003607
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003608- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3609 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3610 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3611 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3612 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3613
3614- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3615 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3616 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3617 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3618
3619- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3620 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3621
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003622Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003623-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003624
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003625- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003626 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3627 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003628
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003629
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003630What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3631===========================
3632
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003633*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3634
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003635Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003636----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003637
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003638- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3639 big to represent as a C double.
3640
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003641- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3642 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3643 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3644 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3645 restriction).
3646
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003647- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3648 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3649 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3650 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3651 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3652
3653 >>> dir([])
3654 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3655 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3656 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3657 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3658 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3659 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3660 'reverse', 'sort']
3661
3662 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3663
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003664- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003665 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3666 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3667 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3668 OverflowError exception.
3669
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003670- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003671 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003672 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3673 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3674 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3675 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3676 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003677 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003678 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3679 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3680
3681 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3682 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3683 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3684 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003685
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003686- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003687 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3688 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3689 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3690 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3691 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3692 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3693 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3694 once it is created.
3695
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003696- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3697 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3698 (key, value) pairs.
3699
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003700- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003701 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3702 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3703
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003704- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3705 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3706 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3707 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3708 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003709
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003710- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003711 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3712 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3713
3714 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3715
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003716- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003717 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3718
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003719Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003720-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003721
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003722- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003723 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3724 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003725
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003726- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3727 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3728 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3729 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3730 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3731 in this area anymore).
3732
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003733- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3734 threading.Timer.
3735
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003736- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3737 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3738
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003739- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003740 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3741
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003742- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003743 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3744 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3745 converted to Python longs.
3746
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003747- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003748 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3749
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003750- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3751 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3752 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3753
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003754Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003755-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003756
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003757- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3758 division operators as per PEP 238.
3759
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003760Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003761-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003762
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003763- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3764 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3765 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3766 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3767
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003768C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003769-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003770
3771- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003772
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003773- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3774 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003775 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003776
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003777 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3778 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003779 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003780 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003781
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003782- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003783 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3784 module:
3785
3786 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003787
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003788 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3789 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003790
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003791 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3792 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003793
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003794 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3795
3796 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3797
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003798- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003799 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3800 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3801 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003802
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003803New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003804-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003805
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003806- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3807 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3808 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3809 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3810 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003811
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003812Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003813-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003814
3815Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003816-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003817
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003818- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3819 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3820 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3821 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003822 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3823 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3824 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3825 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3826 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003827
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003828- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003829 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3830
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003831
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003832What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3833===========================
3834
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003835*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3836
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003837Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003838-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003839
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003840- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3841 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3842
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003843- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3844 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3845 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003846
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003847- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3848 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3849 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3850 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003851
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003852- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3853
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003854- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003855
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003856Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003857-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003858
3859- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003860 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003861 the module docstring for details.
3862
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003863Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003864-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003865
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003866- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003867 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3868 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3869 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003870
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003871- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3872 Nick Mathewson.
3873
3874Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003875----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003876
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003877- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3878 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3879 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3880 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3881 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3882 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3883 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3884 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3885
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003886- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3887 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3888 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3889 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3890
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003891- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3892 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3893 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3894 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3895 come a long way).
3896
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003897- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3898 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3899 write filters for these warnings).
3900
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003901- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3902 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3903 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3904 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3905 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3906
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003907- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3908 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3909 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3910 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3911 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3912 older distribution.
3913
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003914Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003915-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003916
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003917- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3918 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003919 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003920
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003921- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3922 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3923 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3924
3925- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3926
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003927- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3928
3929- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3930
3931- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3932
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003933- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003934
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003935- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3936
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003937New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003938-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003939
3940C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003941-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003942
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003943- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3944 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3945 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3946 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3947 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3948 against buffer overruns.
3949
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003950- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003951 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3952 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003953 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3954 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3955 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3956
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003957- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3958 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3959 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3960 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3961 deprecated.
3962
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003963Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003964-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003965
3966- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3967 relevant is found.
3968
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003969
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003970What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003971===========================
3972
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003973*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3974
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003975Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003976----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003977
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003978- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3979 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3980 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3981 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3982 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3983 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3984 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3985 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003986 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003987 repaired.
3988
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003989- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003990 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003991 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3992 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3993 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3994 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3995 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3996 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3997 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3998 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3999
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004000- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4001 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4002 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4003 leading BMO character).
4004
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004005- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4006 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4007 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4008
4009 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4010 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4011 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004012
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004013 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4014 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4015 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4016 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4017 for various simple to use conversions.
4018
4019 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4020 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4021
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004022 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4023 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4024 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4025 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4026 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4027 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4028 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4029 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4030 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4031 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4032 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4033 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4034 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4035 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4036 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004037
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004038- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4039 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4040 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004041 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004042 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004043
4044 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004045 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4046 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4047 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4048 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4049 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004050 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4051 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004052
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004053 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4054 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4055 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004056 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004057
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004058- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4059 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4060 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4061 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4062 floating arithmetic,
4063
4064 x = 9007199254740992.0
4065 print long(x)
4066
4067 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4068 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4069 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4070 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4071 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4072 functions are of good quality).
4073
4074 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4075 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4076 algorithms to break.
4077
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004078- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4079 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4080 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4081 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4082 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4083 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4084 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4085 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4086 order.
4087
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004088- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4089 operation along the most common code paths.
4090
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004091- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4092 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4093
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004094- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4095 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4096 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4097 {}.update(UserDict())
4098
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004099- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4100 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4101 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4102 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4103 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4104 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4105 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4106 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4107
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004108- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004109 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004110
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004111 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004112 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4113 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004114 join() method of strings
4115 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004116 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4117 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004118 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004119 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004120
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004121- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4122 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4123
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004124- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4125 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4126
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004127- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4128 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4129 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4130 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4131
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004132- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4133 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004134 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004135 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4136 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004137
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004138- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4139
4140
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004141Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004142-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004143
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004144- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004145 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004146 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4147 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4148
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004149- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4150 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4151
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004152- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4153 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4154 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4155 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4156
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004157- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4158 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4159 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4160
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004161- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4162
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004163- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4164
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004165- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4166 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4167 that are still imported into string.py).
4168
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004169- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4170
4171- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4172 Now it does.
4173
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004174- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4175
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004176- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4177 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4178 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4179 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4180 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004181 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4182 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004183
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004184- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4185 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4186 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4187 'help(object)'.
4188
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004189Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004190-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004191
4192- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004193 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004194 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4195 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4196
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004197- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004198 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4199 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004200
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004201C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004202-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004203
4204- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4205 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004206
4207----
4208
4209**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**