blob: 1050ae422dc1f8985ca703ecafff745c336ac354 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Barry Warsaw97f005d2008-12-03 16:46:14 +00007What's New in Python 3.1 alpha 0
8================================
Barry Warsawd8ccd1c2008-11-21 15:13:37 +00009
Antoine Pitrou3ad3a0d2008-12-18 17:08:32 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-200X*
Barry Warsawd8ccd1c2008-11-21 15:13:37 +000011
12Core and Builtins
13-----------------
14
Benjamin Peterson05e782f2009-01-19 15:15:02 +000015- Issue #4991: os.fdopen now raises an OSError for invalid file descriptors.
16
Antoine Pitroue4bc7f62009-01-17 21:06:43 +000017- Issue #4838: When a module is deallocated, free the memory backing the
18 optional module state data.
19
Mark Dickinson8055afd2009-01-17 10:04:45 +000020- Issue #4910: Rename nb_long slot to nb_reserved, and change its
21 type to (void *).
22
Antoine Pitrou8d4e5052009-01-13 22:59:11 +000023- Issue #4935: The overflow checking code in the expandtabs() method common
24 to str, bytes and bytearray could be optimized away by the compiler, letting
25 the interpreter segfault instead of raising an error.
26
Amaury Forgeot d'Arcf343e012009-01-12 23:58:21 +000027- Issue #3720: Fix a crash when an iterator modifies its class and removes its
28 __next__ method.
29
Mark Dickinsone5e298f2009-01-12 20:49:19 +000030- Issue #4910: Builtin int() function and PyNumber_Long/PyNumber_Int API
31 function no longer attempt to call the __long__ slot to convert an object
32 to an integer. Only the __int__ and __trunc__ slots are examined.
33
Martin v. Löwis7c2b66c2009-01-12 08:21:03 +000034- Issue #4893: Use NT threading on CE.
35
Martin v. Löwisec59d042009-01-12 07:59:10 +000036- Issue #4915: Port sysmodule to Windows CE.
37
Antoine Pitrouab868312009-01-10 15:40:25 +000038- Issue #4868: utf-8, utf-16 and latin1 decoding are now 2x to 4x faster. The
39 common cases are optimized thanks to a dedicated fast path and a moderate
40 amount of loop unrolling.
41
Antoine Pitrou14b78f52009-01-09 22:27:08 +000042- Issue #4074: Change the criteria for doing a full garbage collection (i.e.
43 collecting the oldest generation) so that allocating lots of objects without
44 destroying them does not show quadratic performance. Based on a proposal by
45 Martin von Löwis at
46 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-June/080579.html.
47
Antoine Pitrou8043cf82009-01-09 19:54:29 +000048- Issue #4604: Some objects of the I/O library could still be used after
49 having been closed (for instance, a read() call could return some
50 previously buffered data). Patch by Dmitry Vasiliev.
51
Antoine Pitrou05608432009-01-09 18:53:14 +000052- Issue #4705: Fix the -u ("unbuffered binary stdout and stderr") command-line
53 flag to work properly. Furthermore, when specifying -u, the text stdout
54 and stderr streams have line-by-line buffering enabled (the default being
55 to buffer arbitrary chunks of data).
56
Raymond Hettinger35631532009-01-09 03:58:09 +000057- The internal table, _PyLong_DigitValue, is now an array of unsigned chars
58 instead of ints (reducing its size from 4 to 8 times thereby reducing
59 Python's overall memory).
60
Antoine Pitroud35cbf62009-01-06 19:02:24 +000061- Issue #1180193: When importing a module from a .pyc (or .pyo) file with
62 an existing .py counterpart, override the co_filename attributes of all
63 code objects if the original filename is obsolete (which can happen if the
64 file has been renamed, moved, or if it is accessed through different paths).
65 Patch by Ziga Seilnacht and Jean-Paul Calderone.
66
Antoine Pitrouc3b39242009-01-03 16:59:18 +000067- Issue #4580: Fix slicing of memoryviews when the item size is greater than
68 one byte. Also fixes the meaning of len() so that it returns the number of
69 items, rather than the size in bytes.
70
Martin v. Löwis5c88d812009-01-02 20:47:48 +000071- Issue #4075: Use OutputDebugStringW in Py_FatalError.
72
Amaury Forgeot d'Arc374e2202009-01-01 23:05:36 +000073- Issue #4747: When the terminal does not use utf-8, executing a script with
74 non-ascii characters in its name could fail with a "SyntaxError: None" error.
75
Hirokazu Yamamoto0f22d692009-01-01 16:03:45 +000076- Issue #4797: IOError.filename was not set when _fileio.FileIO failed to open
Hirokazu Yamamoto8ed9a802009-01-01 16:09:52 +000077 file with `bytes' filename on Windows.
Hirokazu Yamamoto0f22d692009-01-01 16:03:45 +000078
Antoine Pitrou7ddda782009-01-01 15:35:33 +000079- Issue #3680: Reference cycles created through a dict, set or deque iterator
80 did not get collected.
81
Nick Coghlanf1f2f682008-12-30 07:29:12 +000082- Issue #4701: PyObject_Hash now implicitly calls PyType_Ready on types
83 where the tp_hash and tp_dict slots are both NULL.
84
Georg Brandlccc47b62008-12-28 11:44:14 +000085- Issue #4759: None is now allowed as the first argument of
86 bytearray.translate(). It was always allowed for bytes.translate().
87
Skip Montanaro80072cb2008-12-23 03:51:14 +000088- Added test case to ensure attempts to read from a file opened for writing
89 fail.
90
Antoine Pitrou51f3ef92008-12-20 13:14:23 +000091- Issue #3106: Speedup some comparisons (str/str and int/int).
92
Antoine Pitrouf289ae62008-12-18 11:06:25 +000093- Issue #2183: Simplify and optimize bytecode for list, dict and set
94 comprehensions. Original patch for list comprehensions by Neal Norwitz.
95
Antoine Pitrou621601a2008-12-17 23:18:19 +000096- Issue #2467: gc.DEBUG_STATS reported invalid elapsed times. Also, always
97 print elapsed times, not only when some objects are uncollectable /
98 unreachable. Original patch by Neil Schemenauer.
99
Mark Dickinson54bc1ec2008-12-17 16:19:07 +0000100- Issue #3439: Add a bit_length method to int.
101
Mark Dickinsonda2706b2008-12-11 18:03:03 +0000102- Issue #2173: When getting device encoding, check that return value of
103 nl_langinfo is not the empty string. This was causing silent build
104 failures on OS X.
105
Jeffrey Yasskinb9083f32008-12-11 06:18:33 +0000106- Issue #4597: Fixed several opcodes that weren't always propagating
107 exceptions.
108
109- Issue #4589: Fixed exception handling when the __exit__ function of a
Amaury Forgeot d'Arc10b24e82008-12-10 23:49:33 +0000110 context manager returns a value that cannot be converted to a bool.
111
Mark Dickinsonfd24b322008-12-06 15:33:31 +0000112- Issue #4445: Replace "sizeof(PyBytesObject)" with
113 "offsetof(PyBytesObject, ob_sval) + 1" when allocating memory for
114 bytes instances. On a typical machine this saves 3 bytes of memory
115 (on average) per allocation of a bytes instance.
116
Christian Heimesa872de52008-12-05 08:26:55 +0000117- Issue #4533: File read operation was dreadfully slow due to a slowly
118 growing read buffer. Fixed by using the same growth rate algorithm as
119 Python 2.x.
120
Antoine Pitrou5504e892008-12-06 21:27:53 +0000121- Issue #4509: Various issues surrounding resize of bytearray objects to
122 which there are buffer exports (e.g. memoryview instances).
123
Georg Brandlf9734072008-12-07 15:30:06 +0000124- Issue #4233: Changed semantic of ``_fileio.FileIO``'s ``close()``
125 method on file objects with closefd=False. The file descriptor is still
126 kept open but the file object behaves like a closed file. The ``FileIO``
127 object also got a new readonly attribute ``closefd``.
Matthias Klose7e1b8fa2008-11-26 17:22:04 +0000128
Antoine Pitroubc420402008-12-07 20:14:49 +0000129- Issue #4569: Interpreter crash when mutating a memoryview with an item size
130 larger than 1.
131
Benjamin Peterson371ccfb2008-12-27 19:03:36 +0000132- Issue #4748: Lambda generators no longer return a value.
133
Barry Warsawd8ccd1c2008-11-21 15:13:37 +0000134Library
135-------
136
Brett Cannonafccd632009-01-20 02:21:27 +0000137- Add the importlib package.
138
Jesse Noller9a0fc972009-01-18 21:12:58 +0000139- Issue #4301: Patch the logging module to add processName support, remove
140 _check_logger_class from multiprocessing.
141
Jesse Noller1cbb17a2009-01-18 19:45:18 +0000142- Issue #3325: Remove python2.x try: except: imports for old cPickle from
Jesse Nollerf70a5382009-01-18 19:44:02 +0000143 multiprocessing.
144
Benjamin Peterson9953a8d2009-01-17 04:15:01 +0000145- Issue #4959: inspect.formatargspec now works for keyword only arguments
146 without defaults.
147
Jesse Noller6214edd2009-01-19 16:23:53 +0000148- Issue #3321: _multiprocessing.Connection() doesn't check handle; added checks
149 for *nix machines for negative handles and large int handles. Without this check
150 it is possible to segfault the interpreter.
151
Jesse Nollerb0516a62009-01-18 03:11:38 +0000152- Issue #4449: AssertionError in mp_benchmarks.py, caused by an underlying issue
153 in sharedctypes.py.
154
155- Issue #1225107: inspect.isclass() returned True for instances with a custom
156 __getattr__.
157
Gregory P. Smithde3369f2009-01-12 04:50:11 +0000158- Issue #3826 and #4791: The socket module now closes the underlying socket
159 appropriately when it is being used via socket.makefile() objects
160 rather than delaying the close by waiting for garbage collection to do it.
161
Raymond Hettingerb8baf632009-01-14 02:20:07 +0000162- Issue #1696199: Add collections.Counter() for rapid and convenient
163 counting.
164
Antoine Pitrou308705e2009-01-10 16:22:51 +0000165- Issue #3860: GzipFile and BZ2File now support the context manager protocol.
166
Thomas Heller5e4e4272009-01-08 09:34:20 +0000167- Issue #4867: Fixed a crash in ctypes when passing a string to a
168 function without defining argtypes.
169
Antoine Pitrou42db3ef2009-01-04 21:37:59 +0000170- Issue #4272: Add an optional argument to the GzipFile constructor to override
171 the timestamp in the gzip stream. The default value remains the current time.
172 The information can be used by e.g. gunzip when decompressing. Patch by
173 Jacques Frechet.
174
Mark Dickinson315a20a2009-01-04 21:34:18 +0000175- Restore Python 2.3 compatibility for decimal.py.
176
Guilherme Polo3f5f8222009-01-03 22:00:39 +0000177- Issue #3638: Remove functions from _tkinter module level that depend on
178 TkappObject to work with multiple threads.
179
Antoine Pitrou38a66ad2009-01-03 18:41:49 +0000180- Issue #4718: Adapt the wsgiref package so that it actually works with
181 Python 3.x, in accordance with the `official amendments of the spec
182 <http://www.wsgi.org/wsgi/Amendments_1.0>`_.
183
Raymond Hettinger771ed762009-01-03 19:20:32 +0000184- Issue #4796: Added Decimal.from_float() and Context.create_decimal_from_float()
185 to the decimal module.
186
Georg Brandl3a9b0622009-01-03 22:07:57 +0000187- Fractions.from_float() no longer loses precision for integers too big to
188 cast as floats.
189
Mark Dickinsonf9236412009-01-02 23:23:21 +0000190- Issue #4812: add missing underscore prefix to some internal-use-only
191 constants in the decimal module. (Dec_0 becomes _Dec_0, etc.)
192
Georg Brandl3a9b0622009-01-03 22:07:57 +0000193- Issue 4790: The nsmallest() and nlargest() functions in the heapq module
194 did unnecessary work in the common case where no key function was specified.
195
Georg Brandlb1441c72009-01-03 22:33:39 +0000196- Issue #4795: inspect.isgeneratorfunction() returns False instead of None when
197 the function is not a generator.
198
Tarek Ziadé9df8ce32008-12-30 23:09:20 +0000199- Issue #4702: Throwing a DistutilsPlatformError instead of IOError in case
200 no MSVC compiler is found under Windows. Original patch by Philip Jenvey.
201
Tarek Ziadé4450dcf2008-12-29 22:38:38 +0000202- Issue #4646: distutils was choking on empty options arg in the setup
203 function. Original patch by Thomas Heller.
204
Martin v. Löwis1f1620e2008-12-29 16:27:13 +0000205- Issue #3767: Convert Tk object to string in tkColorChooser.
206
Martin v. Löwise354d782008-12-29 16:03:04 +0000207- Issue #3248: Allow placing ScrolledText in a PanedWindow.
208
Antoine Pitrou5acd41e2008-12-28 14:29:00 +0000209- Issue #4444: Allow assertRaises() to be used as a context handler, so that
210 the code under test can be written inline if more practical.
211
Georg Brandldb7b6b92009-01-01 15:53:14 +0000212- Issue #4739: Add pydoc help topics for symbols, so that e.g. help('@')
213 works as expected in the interactive environment.
214
Antoine Pitroudb5fe662008-12-27 15:50:40 +0000215- Issue #4756: zipfile.is_zipfile() now supports file-like objects. Patch by
216 Gabriel Genellina.
217
Antoine Pitrou180a3362008-12-14 16:36:46 +0000218- Issue #4574: reading an UTF16-encoded text file crashes if \r on 64-char
219 boundary.
220
Nick Coghlanf088e5e2008-12-14 11:50:48 +0000221- Issue #4223: inspect.getsource() will now correctly display source code
222 for packages loaded via zipimport (or any other conformant PEP 302
223 loader). Original patch by Alexander Belopolsky.
224
225- Issue #4201: pdb can now access and display source code loaded via
226 zipimport (or any other conformant PEP 302 loader). Original patch by
227 Alexander Belopolsky.
228
229- Issue #4197: doctests in modules loaded via zipimport (or any other PEP
230 302 conformant loader) will now work correctly in most cases (they
231 are still subject to the constraints that exist for all code running
232 from inside a module loaded via a PEP 302 loader and attempting to
233 perform IO operations based on __file__). Original patch by
234 Alexander Belopolsky.
235
236- Issues #4082 and #4512: Add runpy support to zipimport in a manner that
237 allows backporting to maintenance branches. Original patch by
238 Alexander Belopolsky.
239
Antoine Pitrou7c59bc62008-12-13 23:20:54 +0000240- Issue #4163: textwrap module: allow word splitting on a hyphen preceded by
241 a non-ASCII letter.
242
Lars Gustäbel43fcf3a2008-12-12 14:58:38 +0000243- Issue #4616: TarFile.utime(): Restore directory times on Windows.
244
Benjamin Peterson433f32c2008-12-12 01:25:05 +0000245- Issue #4021: tokenize.detect_encoding() now raises a SyntaxError when the
246 codec cannot be found. This is for compatibility with the builtin behavior.
247
Facundo Batista708d5812008-12-11 04:20:07 +0000248- Issue #4084: Fix max, min, max_mag and min_mag Decimal methods to
249 give correct results in the case where one argument is a quiet NaN
250 and the other is a finite number that requires rounding.
251
Skip Montanaroc1ce2862008-12-06 17:25:02 +0000252- Issue #4483: _dbm module now builds on systems with gdbm & gdbm_compat
253 libs.
254
Georg Brandlf9734072008-12-07 15:30:06 +0000255- Added the subprocess.check_call_output() convenience function to get output
256 from a subprocess on success or raise an exception on error.
257
258- Issue #1055234: cgi.parse_header(): Fixed parsing of header parameters to
259 support unusual filenames (such as those containing semi-colons) in
260 Content-Disposition headers.
261
262- Issue #4384: Added logging integration with warnings module using
263 captureWarnings(). This change includes a NullHandler which does nothing;
264 it will be of use to library developers who want to avoid the "No handlers
265 could be found for logger XXX" message which can appear if the library user
266 doesn't configure logging.
267
268- Issue #3741: DISTUTILS_USE_SDK set causes msvc9compiler.py to raise an
269 exception.
270
Georg Brandleee31162008-12-07 15:15:22 +0000271- Issue #4529: fix the parser module's validation of try-except-finally
272 statements.
273
274- Issue #4458: getopt.gnu_getopt() now recognizes a single "-" as an argument,
275 not a malformed option.
276
277- Added the subprocess.check_output() convenience function to get output
278 from a subprocess on success or raise an exception on error.
279
Amaury Forgeot d'Arcbc9d4742008-12-05 01:40:43 +0000280- Issue #4542: On Windows, binascii.crc32 still accepted str as binary input;
281 the corresponding tests now pass.
282
Amaury Forgeot d'Arcbc2ce572008-12-05 01:02:21 +0000283- Issue #4537: webbrowser.UnixBrowser would fail to open the browser because
284 it was calling the wrong open() function.
285
Fred Drake9a0a65b2008-12-04 19:24:50 +0000286- Issue #1055234: cgi.parse_header(): Fixed parsing of header parameters to
287 support unusual filenames (such as those containing semi-colons) in
288 Content-Disposition headers.
289
Matthias Klose2c7e3ee2009-01-10 17:08:25 +0000290- Issue #4861: ctypes.util.find_library(): Robustify. Fix library detection on
291 biarch systems. Try to rely on ldconfig only, without using objdump and gcc.
292
Antoine Pitrou2a013ea2008-12-27 20:39:28 +0000293Tools/Demos
294-----------
295
296- Issue #4677: add two list comprehension tests to pybench.
297
Georg Brandlb1441c72009-01-03 22:33:39 +0000298
299Build
300-----
301
Martin v. Löwise97637d2009-01-11 09:45:11 +0000302- Issue #4895: Use _strdup on Windows CE.
303
Georg Brandlb1441c72009-01-03 22:33:39 +0000304- Issue #4472: "configure --enable-shared" now works on OSX
305
306- Issues #4728 and #4060: WORDS_BIGEDIAN is now correct in Universal builds.
307
308- Issue #4389: Add icon to the uninstall entry in "add-and-remove-programs".
309
310- Issue #4289: Remove Cancel button from AdvancedDlg.
311
312- Issue #1656675: Register a drop handler for .py* files on Windows.
313
314- Issue #4120: Exclude manifest from extension modules in VS2008.
315
316- Issue #4091: Install pythonxy.dll in system32 again.
317
318- Issue #4018: Disable "for me" installations on Vista.
319
320- Issue #3758: Add ``patchcheck`` build target to .PHONY.
321
322- Issue #4204: Fixed module build errors on FreeBSD 4.
323
324
325C-API
326-----
327
328- Issue #4720: The format for PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords can begin with '|'.
329
330- Issue #3632: from the gdb debugger, the 'pyo' macro can now be called when
331 the GIL is released, or owned by another thread.
332
333- Issue #4122: On Windows, fix a compilation error when using the
334 Py_UNICODE_ISSPACE macro in an extension module.
335
336
Mark Dickinsone675f082008-12-11 21:56:00 +0000337Extension Modules
338-----------------
339
Mark Dickinson29500f62009-01-15 15:36:10 +0000340- Issue #4397: Fix occasional test_socket failure on OS X.
341
Martin v. Löwisa9b54c72009-01-11 09:30:50 +0000342- Issue #4279: Fix build of parsermodule under Cygwin.
343
Antoine Pitroubcd5cbe2009-01-08 21:17:16 +0000344- Issue #4751: hashlib now releases the GIL when hashing large buffers
345 (with a hardwired threshold of 2048 bytes), allowing better parallelization
346 on multi-CPU systems. Contributed by Lukas Lueg (ebfe) and Victor Stinner.
347
Martin v. Löwis5c88d812009-01-02 20:47:48 +0000348- Issue #4051: Prevent conflict of UNICODE macros in cPickle.
349
Antoine Pitrou31f30b12009-01-02 17:34:35 +0000350- Issue #4738: Each zlib object now has a separate lock, allowing to compress
351 or decompress several streams at once on multi-CPU systems. Also, the GIL
352 is now released when computing the CRC of a large buffer. Patch by ebfe.
353
Georg Brandlb1441c72009-01-03 22:33:39 +0000354- Issue #4228: Pack negative values the same way as 2.4 in struct's L format.
355
Martin v. Löwis05bfe1f2008-12-29 18:21:47 +0000356- Issue #1040026: Fix os.times result on systems where HZ is incorrect.
357
Mark Dickinsone675f082008-12-11 21:56:00 +0000358- Issues #3167, #3682: Fix test_math failures for log, log10 on Solaris,
359 OpenBSD.
Amaury Forgeot d'Arcefae8c42008-11-21 23:08:09 +0000360
Antoine Pitrou3ad3a0d2008-12-18 17:08:32 +0000361- Issue #4583: array.array would not always prohibit resizing when a buffer
362 has been exported, resulting in an interpreter crash when accessing the
363 buffer.
364
Martin v. Löwis841edad2008-11-30 10:36:49 +0000365
Brett Cannon7317c1e2008-11-25 19:19:17 +0000366Docs
367----
368
Georg Brandl52b92cc2008-05-25 09:43:03 +0000369
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000370**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**