blob: 235c257dbdde4c3a6d4c096c7c475ea9b992e962 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000013- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
14 list.sort().
15
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000016
17Extension Modules
18-----------------
19
20
21Library
22-------
23
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +000024- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
25
Raymond Hettinger4ebe3642004-12-05 04:55:14 +000026- the depecated statcache module was removed.
27
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +000028- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
29
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +000030- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
31
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +000032- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
33
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +000034- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
35 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
36 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
37
Raymond Hettinger784ab762004-12-04 10:50:51 +000038- the deprecated whrandom module was removed. Use the random module instead.
39
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000040- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000041 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000042
43
44Build
45-----
46
47
48C API
49-----
50
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +000051- Removed PyRange_New().
52
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000053
54Tests
55-----
56
57
58Mac
59---
60
61
62
63Tools/Demos
64-----------
65
66
67
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +000068What's New in Python 2.4 final?
69===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +000070
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +000071*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +000072
73Core and builtins
74-----------------
75
76- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
77 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
78 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
79
80
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +000081What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
82==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000083
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +000084*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000085
86Core and builtins
87-----------------
88
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +000089- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
90 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
91 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
92
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000093
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +000094Library
95-------
96
97- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
98 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
99 raised is re-raised.
100
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000101- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
102 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
103
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000104- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
105 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
106 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
107 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
108 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
109 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
110 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
111 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
112 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
113 by the slice are recomputed now.
114
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000115- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000116
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000117Build
118-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000119
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000120- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
121 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
122 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000123
124C API
125-----
126
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000127- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
128
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000129
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000130What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
131================================
132
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000133*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000134
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000135License
136-------
137
138The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
139is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
140changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
141Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
142intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
143durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
144the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
145License::
146
147 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
148
149says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
150to Python 2.1.1.
151
152The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
153License Version 2.
154
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000155Core and builtins
156-----------------
157
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000158- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
159 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
160 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
161 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
162 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
163 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
164 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
165 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
166 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
167 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
168
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000169- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000170
171Extension Modules
172-----------------
173
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000174- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
175 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
176 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
177 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000178
179Library
180-------
181
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000182- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
183 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
184 returned.
185
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000186- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
187
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000188- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
189 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
190
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000191- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
192
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000193- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
194 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000195
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000196- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
197
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000198- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
199
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000200- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000201 the source code is updated and reloaded.
202
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000203Build
204-----
205
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000206- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000207
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000208What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
209================================
210
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000211*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000212
213Core and builtins
214-----------------
215
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000216- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000217 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
218
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000219- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
220 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
221 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
222 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
223
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000224- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
225 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
226
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000227- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
228 constant.
229
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000230- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
231 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
232 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
233 large), and to anomalies such as
234 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
235 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
236 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
237 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000238
239Extension modules
240-----------------
241
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000242- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
243 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000244 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
245 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
246 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000247
248Library
249-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000250
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000251- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000252 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000253 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
254 --swig-cpp.
255
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000256- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
257 it is set.
258
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000259- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000260
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000261- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
262 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
263 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
264 Closes bug #1039270.
265
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000266- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000267
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000268 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000269 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
270 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
271 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
272 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
273 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
274 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
275 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
276 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
277 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
278 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
279 + Updates to documentation.
280
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000281- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
282 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
283 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
284 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
285
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000286- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000287
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000288- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
289 applications should use the getmember function.
290
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000291- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
292
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000293- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
294 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
295 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
296 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
297 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
298 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
299 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
300 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
301 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
302
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000303- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
304 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000305 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000306
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000307- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
308 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
309 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
310 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
311 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
312 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
313 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
314 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000315
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000316- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
317 the new public features (of which there are many).
318
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000319- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000320 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
321 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
322 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
323 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000324 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000325
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000326- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
327
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000328- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
329 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
330 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
331 options.
332
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000333- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
334 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
335 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
336 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
337 conditions under which non-string values work.
338
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000339Build
340-----
341
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000342- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
343 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
344 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
345
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000346- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
347 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
348 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
349 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
350 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000351
352C API
353-----
354
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000355- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
356 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
357
358- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
359
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000360- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
361 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
362 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
363 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
364 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
365 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
366 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
367 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
368 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
369
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000370- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
371
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000372- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
373 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
374 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000375
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000376Tests
377-----
378
379- test__locale ported to unittest
380
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000381Mac
382---
383
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000384- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
385 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
386 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000387
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000388Tools/Demos
389-----------
390
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000391- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
392 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
393 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
394 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
395 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000396
397
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000398What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
399=================================
400
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000401*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000402
403Core and builtins
404-----------------
405
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000406- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000407 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
408
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000409- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
410 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
411 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
412 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
413 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
414 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
415 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
416 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000417 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
418 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
419 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
420 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
421 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000422
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000423- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
424 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
425 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
426 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
427 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
428
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000429- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
430
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000431- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
432 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
433
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000434- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
435 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
436 modified the list.
437
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000438- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
439 functions is now writable.
440
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000441- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
442 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
443 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
444 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
445
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000446- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
447 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
448 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
449 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
450 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000451
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000452- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
453 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
454
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000455Extension modules
456-----------------
457
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000458- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
459
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000460- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
461 data.
462
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000463- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
464 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
465 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
466 supposed to have been truncated away.
467
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000468- Added socket.socketpair().
469
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000470- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
471 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
472
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000473- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000474 versions of Python, have now been removed.
475
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000476Library
477-------
478
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000479- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000480 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000481
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000482- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
483 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
484
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000485- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
486 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
487
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000488- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
489
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000490- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
491 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000492
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000493- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
494 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
495
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000496- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
497
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000498- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
499
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000500- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
501
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000502- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
503 Percivall.
504
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000505- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
506 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
507
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000508- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
509 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
510 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000511 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000512
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000513- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
514 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
515 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
516 and exponent.
517
518- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
519
520- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
521 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
522 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
523
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000524- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
525 to the readline module.
526
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000527- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000528 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
529 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000530
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000531- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
532 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
533 contains symlinks.
534
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000535- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
536 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
537
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000538- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
539 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
540 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
541
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000542- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
543 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
544 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
545 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
546 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
547 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
548 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
549 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
550 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
551 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
552 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
553 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
554 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
555
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000556- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
557
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000558Tools/Demos
559-----------
560
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000561- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
562 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
563
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000564- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
565
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000566Build
567-----
568
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000569- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
570 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
571 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
572 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
573 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
574 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
575 plans to do so.
576
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000577- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
578 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
579
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000580- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
581 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
582
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000583- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
584 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
585
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000586- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
587 GNU/k*BSD systems.
588
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000589- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
590 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
591
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000592C API
593-----
594
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000595..
596
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000597Documentation
598-------------
599
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000600- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
601 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
602
603- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
604 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
605 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000606
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000607New platforms
608-------------
609
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000610- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
611
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000612Tests
613-----
614
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000615..
616
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000617Windows
618-------
619
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000620- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
621 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
622 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
623 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
624 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
625 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
626 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
627 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
628 the problem.
629
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000630Mac
631---
632
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000633..
634
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000635
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000636What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
637=================================
638
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000639*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000640
641Core and builtins
642-----------------
643
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000644- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
645 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
646 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
647 sensitive code.
648
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000649- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000650 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000651
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000652 @staticmethod
653 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000654
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000655 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000656
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000657- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
658 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
659 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
660 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
661 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
662 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
663 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
664 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
665 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
666 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
667 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
668
669 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
670 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
671 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
672 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
673 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
674 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
675 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
676
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000677- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
678 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
679
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000680- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000681 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000682
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000683- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000684 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000685 which was missing for no apparent reason.
686
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000687- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000688 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
689 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
690
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000691- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
692 types that support garbage collection.
693
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000694- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
695
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000696- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
697 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
698 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
699 Jython.
700
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000701- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
702
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000703- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
704 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
705
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000706- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
707 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
708 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000709
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000710- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
711 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
712 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
713
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000714Extension modules
715-----------------
716
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000717- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
718
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000719Library
720-------
721
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000722- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
723 TIS-620
724
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000725- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
726 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
727 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
728 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
729 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
730 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
731 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
732 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
733 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
734 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
735
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000736- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
737
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000738- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
739 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
740 same as when the argument is omitted).
741 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
742
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000743- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
744
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000745- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
746 schemes are offered.
747
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000748- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
749
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000750- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
751 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
752 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
753
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000754- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
755
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000756- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
757 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
758
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000759- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
760 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
761 when dummy_threading is being used.
762
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000763- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
764 from a tarfile.
765
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000766- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000767 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000768
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000769- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
770 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
771 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
772 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
773
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000774- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
775 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
776
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000777- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
778 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
779 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
780 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
781 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
782 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
783 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
784 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
785 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
786 by some other method in progress).
787
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000788- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
789 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
790 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000791
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000792- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
793
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000794- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
795 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
796 AM Kuchling.
797
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000798- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
799 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
800 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
801
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000802- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
803 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
804 instead of unsigned.
805
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000806- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000807 no longer part of the public API.
808
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000809- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
810 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
811 string methods of the same name).
812
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000813- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000814 SF patch 945642.
815
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000816- doctest unittest integration improvements:
817
818 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
819
820 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
821 DocTestSuites.
822
823- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
824 that provide thread-local data.
825
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000826- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
827 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
828
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000829- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
830
831- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
832 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
833 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
834
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000835- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
836
837 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
838 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
839 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000840
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000841 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
842 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
843 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
844 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
845
846 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
847 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
848
849 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
850 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
851 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
852 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
853
854 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
855 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
856 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
857 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
858 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
859
860 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
861 wrapping help output.
862
863 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
864 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
865 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000866
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000867C API
868-----
869
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000870- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
871 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
872 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
873 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
874 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
875 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
876 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
877 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
878 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
879 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
880 its visible semantics have not changed.
881
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000882- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
883 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
884
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000885Documentation
886-------------
887
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000888- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000889
890 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000891 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000892
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000893 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000894
895 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
896
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000897- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000898
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000899Tests
900-----
901
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000902- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000903 platforms that use the Makefile.
904
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000905- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
906 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
907 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
908
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000909
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000910What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
911=================================
912
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000913*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000914
915Core and builtins
916-----------------
917
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000918- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
919 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
920 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
921 objects now (one object instead of three).
922
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000923- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
924 Windows DLLs.
925
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000926- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
927 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000928
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000929- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
930 a new .pyc magic.
931
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000932- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
933 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
934 be there.
935
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000936- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
937 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
938 the LC_NUMERIC category.
939
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000940- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
941 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
942 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
943
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000944- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
945
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000946- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
947 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
948 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000949
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000950- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
951 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
952
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000953- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
954
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000955- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000956 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000957
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000958- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
959
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000960- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
961
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000962- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
963 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
964
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000965- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
966 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
967 Fixes bug #858016 .
968
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000969- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
970 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
971 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
972
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000973- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
974 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
975 improves their performance (about 35%).
976
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000977- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
978 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
979 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
980
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000981- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
982 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
983 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
984 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
985
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000986- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
987 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
988 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
989 length is not known).
990
991- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
992 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000993 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
994 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000995 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
996
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000997- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
998 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
999
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001000- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1001 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1002 keyword arguments.
1003
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001004- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1005 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1006 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1007
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001008- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1009 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1010 cases.
1011
1012- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1013 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1014 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1015 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1016 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1017 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1018 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1019 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1020 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1021 a release build.
1022
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001023- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1024 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1025
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001026- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001027 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001028
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001029- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1030 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1031 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1032 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1033 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1034 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1035 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1036 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1037 destroyed.
1038
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001039- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1040 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1041 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1042 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1043 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1044 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1045 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1046 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1047
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001048- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1049 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1050 character other than a space.
1051
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001052- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1053 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1054 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1055 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1056 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1057 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1058 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1059 attributes with the same name.
1060
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001061- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1062 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1063 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1064 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1065 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1066 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1067 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1068 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1069 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1070 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1071 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1072 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1073 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1074 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001075
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001076- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1077 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1078 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1079 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1080 This has been repaired.
1081
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001082- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1083
1084- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1085
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001086- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1087 over a sequence.
1088
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001089- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001090 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001091
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001092- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1093
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001094- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1095 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1096 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1097 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1098 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1099 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1100 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1101 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1102
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001103- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1104 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1105 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1106
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001107- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1108 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1109 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1110 freelist.
1111
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001112- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1113 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1114
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001115- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1116 number.
1117
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001118- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1119 a TypeError exception.
1120
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001121- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1122 820195.
1123
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001124- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1125 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1126 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1127
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001128- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001129 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1130 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001131
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001132- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1133 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1134 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1135
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001136- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1137 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001138 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001139
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001140- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001141 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1142 the first call.
1143
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001144
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001145Extension modules
1146-----------------
1147
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001148- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1149 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1150
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001151- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1152 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1153 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1154 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1155 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1156 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1157 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001158
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001159- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1160
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001161- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1162
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001163- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1164 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1165
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001166- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1167 fewer false positives.
1168
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001169- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1170 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1171
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001172- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001173 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1174
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001175- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001176 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001177 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001178 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1179 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001180
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001181- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1182 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1183 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1184 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1185
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001186- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1187 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1188 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1189 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1190 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1191 #897625.
1192
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001193- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1194 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1195
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001196- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1197 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1198 and pops on either side of the deque.
1199
1200- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1201 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1202
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001203- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1204 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1205 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1206 other functions that expect a function argument.
1207
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001208- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1209
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001210- os.getsid was added.
1211
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001212- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1213 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1214 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1215
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001216- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1217
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001218- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1219
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001220- readline.clear_history was added.
1221
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001222- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1223
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001224- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1225
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001226- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1227
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001228- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1229
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001230- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1231
1232- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1233
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001234- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1235
1236- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1237
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001238- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1239 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1240 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1241
1242- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1243 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1244 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1245 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1246 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1247 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1248 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1249
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001250- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1251 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1252 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1253 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001254
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001255- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001256 iterators from a single iterable.
1257
1258- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1259 of raising a TypeError exception.
1260
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001261- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1262 as parameter.
1263
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001264Library
1265-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001266
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001267- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1268 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1269 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001270
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001271- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1272 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1273 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001274
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001275- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001276
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001277- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1278 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001279
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001280- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1281 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1282
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001283- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1284
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001285- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001286 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001287
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001288- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001289 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001290
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001291- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1292
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001293- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1294 on cygwin and mingw32.
1295
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001296- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1297
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001298- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1299 module.
1300
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001301- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1302 installation scheme for all platforms.
1303
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001304- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001305 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001306
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001307- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1308 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1309 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1310
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001311- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1312 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1313 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1314
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001315- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1316
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001317- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1318
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001319- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1320 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1321
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001322- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1323 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1324 type pattern with the same value exists.
1325
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001326- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1327 when run from the command prompt).
1328
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001329- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1330 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1331
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001332- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1333 default sort).
1334
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001335- Added global runctx function to profile module
1336
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001337- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1338
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001339- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1340
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001341- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1342
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001343- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001344 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1345 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1346 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1347 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1348 accordingly.
1349
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001350- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1351 decoding standards.
1352
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001353- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1354 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1355 called for all requests.
1356
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001357- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1358 they are passed to the compiler.
1359
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001360- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1361 indent, width and depth.
1362
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001363- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1364 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1365
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001366- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1367 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1368
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001369- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1370
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001371- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1372
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001373- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1374
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001375- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1376 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1377
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001378- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001379 for better performance.
1380
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001381- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001382
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001383- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1384 a string).
1385
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001386- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1387
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001388- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1389
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001390- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1391
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001392- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1393
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001394- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1395 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1396 list of fieldnames.
1397
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001398- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1399 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1400
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001401- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1402
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001403- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1404 empty lists.
1405
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001406- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1407 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1408 and shelves.
1409
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001410- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1411 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1412
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001413- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001414 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1415 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001416
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001417- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1418 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001419 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001420
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001421- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001422 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1423 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1424
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001425- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1426 and removed in Py2.4.
1427
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001428- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1429
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001430- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1431
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001432Tools/Demos
1433-----------
1434
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001435- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1436 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1437
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001438- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1439
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001440- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1441 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1442 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1443 destination in situations where both files are given.
1444
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001445- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1446 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1447 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1448 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1449
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001450- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1451
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001452- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1453 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1454 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1455 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1456 now.
1457
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001458- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1459 in effect
1460
1461- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1462 C-c C-h
1463
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001464- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1465 -d option was given.
1466
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001467Build
1468-----
1469
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001470- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1471 build under OS X.
1472
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001473- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1474 --enable-profiling.
1475
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001476- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1477 is configured --with-tsc.
1478
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001479- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1480 on AMD64.
1481
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001482- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1483 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1484
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001485- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1486 removed.
1487
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001488- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1489 supported (see PEP 11).
1490
1491- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1492
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001493- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1494
1495- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1496 (see PEP 11).
1497
1498- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1499 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1500
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001501C API
1502-----
1503
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001504- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1505 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1506 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1507
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001508- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1509 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1510 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1511 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1512
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001513- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1514 generator objects.
1515
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001516- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1517 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001518 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1519 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001520
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001521- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1522 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1523
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001524- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1525 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1526 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1527 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1528 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1529
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001530- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1531 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1532 about 10% faster.
1533
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001534- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1535 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1536
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001537- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1538 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1539 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1540 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1541
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001542Windows
1543-------
1544
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001545- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1546 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1547 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1548 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1549
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001550- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1551 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1552 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1553
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001554
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001555What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1556===============================
1557
1558*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1559
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001560IDLE
1561----
1562
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001563- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1564 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1565 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1566 context-menu actions.
1567
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001568- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1569 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1570 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1571 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1572 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1573 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1574 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1575 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1576 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1577
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001578
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001579What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1580=============================================
1581
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001582*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001583
1584Core and builtins
1585-----------------
1586
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001587- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001588 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001589 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1590
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001591Extension modules
1592-----------------
1593
1594- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1595 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1596 than once. This has been fixed.
1597
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001598- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1599 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1600 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1601 call.
1602
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001603- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1604
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001605Library
1606-------
1607
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001608- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1609 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1610
1611- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1612 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1613 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1614 restored.
1615
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001616IDLE
1617----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001618
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001619- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001620
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001621Build
1622-----
1623
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001624- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1625 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1626
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001627C API
1628-----
1629
1630Windows
1631-------
1632
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001633- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1634 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1635
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001636- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1637
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001638Mac
1639---
1640
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001641- Various fixes to pimp.
1642
1643- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1644
1645- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1646 more problems than it solves.
1647
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001648
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001649What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1650=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001651
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001652*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1653
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001654Core and builtins
1655-----------------
1656
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001657- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1658 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1659
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001660- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1661 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001662 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001663
1664- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1665 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1666 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001667 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001668
1669- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1670 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001671
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001672- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1673 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1674 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1675
1676- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001677 770247.
1678
1679- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001680
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001681Extension modules
1682-----------------
1683
1684- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1685 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1686
1687- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1688
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001689- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1690
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001691- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1692 contained within the _strptime module.
1693
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001694- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1695 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1696
1697- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001698 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1699
1700- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1701 the find_class attribute, if present.
1702
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001703- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001704
1705 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1706 (SF bug 763298).
1707
1708 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001709 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1710 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1711 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001712
1713 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1714
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001715Library
1716-------
1717
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001718- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1719
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001720- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1721 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1722 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1723 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1724 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1725 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1726 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1727 or Tester().
1728
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001729- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1730 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1731 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1732 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1733 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1734 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1735 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1736 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1737 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001738
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001739 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001740
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001741- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1742 weren't before was an oversight.
1743
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001744- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1745 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1746
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001747- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1748 when there are no lines.
1749
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001750- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1751 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1752
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001753- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1754 to child processes.
1755
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001756- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1757
1758- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1759
1760- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1761 xmlrpclib.
1762
1763- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1764 responses.
1765
1766- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1767 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1768
1769- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1770 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1771 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1772
1773- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1774 used as patterns.
1775
1776- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1777 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1778 than Tk 8.3.
1779
1780- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1781
1782- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001783
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001784Tools/Demos
1785-----------
1786
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001787- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1788
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001789- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1790
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001791- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001792
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001793Build
1794-----
1795
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001796- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1797
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001798- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1799
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001800- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1801 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001802
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001803- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1804 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1805 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001806
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001807C API
1808-----
1809
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001810- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1811 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1812
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001813Windows
1814-------
1815
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001816- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1817 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1818 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1819 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1820 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1821 Python exception ::
1822
1823 thread.error: can't start new thread
1824
1825 is raised now.
1826
1827- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1828 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1829 instead of from DLL teardown.
1830
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001831Mac
1832---
1833
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001834- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001835 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001836 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1837 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1838 the executable in the bundle.
1839
1840- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001841
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001842- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1843
1844- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1845 on Panther.
1846
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001847What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1848================================
1849
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001850*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001851
1852Core and builtins
1853-----------------
1854
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001855- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1856 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1857 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1858 with the -i option.
1859
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001860- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1861 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1862
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001863- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1864 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1865
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001866- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1867 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1868 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1869 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1870 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1871 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1872 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1873 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1874 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1875 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1876 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1877 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1878 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001879
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001880- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1881 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1882 embedded in a lambda expression.
1883
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001884- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1885 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1886 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1887 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1888 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1889
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001890- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1891 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1892 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1893
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001894- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1895 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1896
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001897- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1898 It's writable again.
1899
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001900- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1901 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1902 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001903 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001904
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001905- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1906 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1907 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1908
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001909Extension modules
1910-----------------
1911
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001912- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1913 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1914
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001915- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1916 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1917 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1918 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1919
1920- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1921 collection.
1922
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001923- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1924 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1925 unique within a single program run.
1926
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001927- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1928 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1929
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001930- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1931 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1932
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001933- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1934 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001935
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001936- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1937
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001938- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1939 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1940
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001941- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1942 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1943 for many BSD-derived systems.
1944
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001945
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001946Library
1947-------
1948
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001949- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1950 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1951 primary ones:
1952
1953 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1954 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1955 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1956
1957 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1958 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1959 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1960 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1961 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1962 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1963
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001964- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1965 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1966 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1967 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1968 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1969 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1970 argument.
1971
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001972- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1973 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1974 in the archive.
1975
1976- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1977 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1978
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001979- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1980 569574).
1981
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001982- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1983 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1984 no more.
1985
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001986- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1987 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1988 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1989 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1990 code coverage.
1991
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001992- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1993 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1994 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001995 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1996 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001997
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001998- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1999 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2000 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002001 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002002
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002003- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2004
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002005- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2006 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2007 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2008 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2009
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002010- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2011 handling.
2012
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002013- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2014 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2015
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002016- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2017 in socket.py.
2018
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002019- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2020
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002021- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2022 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2023 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2024 opener with proxy support.
2025
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002026- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2027
2028- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2029
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002030Tools/Demos
2031-----------
2032
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002033- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2034
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002035- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2036
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002037- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2038 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002039
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002040- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2041 files.
2042
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002043Build
2044-----
2045
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002046- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002047 different root directory.
2048
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002049C API
2050-----
2051
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002052- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2053 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2054 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2055 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2056 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2057 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2058 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2059 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2060 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2061 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2062
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002063- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2064 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2065 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2066 from Python.
2067
2068
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002069New platforms
2070-------------
2071
2072None this time.
2073
2074Tests
2075-----
2076
2077- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2078 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2079
2080Windows
2081-------
2082
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002083- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2084
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002085- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2086 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2087 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2088 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2089 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2090 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2091 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2092 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2093 that's what it's for.
2094
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002095Mac
2096---
2097
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002098- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2099 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2100 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2101 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002102- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2103 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2104- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002105
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002106SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2107------------------------------------
2108
2109430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2110598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2111622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2112661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2113683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2114697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2115713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2116724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2117727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2118729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2119730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2120731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2121732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2122733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2123735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2124740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2125744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2126745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2127747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2128749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2129751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2130753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2131755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2132757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2133760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2134
2135
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002136What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2137================================
2138
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002139*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002140
2141Core and builtins
2142-----------------
2143
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002144- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2145 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2146
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002147- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2148 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2149 and cannot be strings).
2150
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002151- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2152 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2153 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2154 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2155
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002156- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2157 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2158 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2159 Python itself.
2160
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002161- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2162 the referenced object, if it has one.
2163
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002164- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2165 the thread started at
2166 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2167
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002168- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2169 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2170 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2171 placed on a list index.
2172
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002173- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2174 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2175 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2176 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2177
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002178- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2179 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2180 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2181 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2182 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2183 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2184 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2185
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002186- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2187 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2188 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2189 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2190 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2191
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002192- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2193 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002194
2195- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2196 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2197 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2198 #693195.)
2199
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002200- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2201 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002202
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002203- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002204 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002205 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2206 interpreter executions, would fail.
2207
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002208- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002209 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002210 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002211
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002212Extension modules
2213-----------------
2214
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002215- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2216 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2217 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2218 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2219
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002220- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2221 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2222
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002223- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2224 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2225 and Greg Chapman.)
2226
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002227- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2228 recursively.
2229
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002230- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002231 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2232 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2233 leaks.
2234
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002235- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2236
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002237- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2238 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2239 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2240 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2241 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2242 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2243 #705836.
2244
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002245- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002246 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2247
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002248- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2249 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2250 See SF bug #692416.
2251
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002252- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2253 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2254
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002255- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2256 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2257 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002258
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002259- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002260 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2261 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2262
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002263- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2264 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2265 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2266 timeouts to work properly.
2267
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002268Library
2269-------
2270
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002271- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2272 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2273 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2274 future release.
2275
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002276- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2277 for querying platform dependent features.
2278
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002279- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002280
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002281- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2282 pickle protocol versions.
2283
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002284- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2285 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2286 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2287
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002288- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2289
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002290- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2291 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2292 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2293 modules.
2294
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002295- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2296 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2297 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2298
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002299- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2300 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2301
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002302- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2303 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2304 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2305
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002306- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002307 MS Office extensions.
2308
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002309- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2310 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2311
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002312- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2313 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2314
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002315- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2316 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2317 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2318 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2319 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2320 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2321
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002322- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2323 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2324 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002325
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002326- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2327 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2328 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2329
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002330- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2331
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002332- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2333 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2334 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2335
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002336Tools/Demos
2337-----------
2338
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002339- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2340 See the module docstring for details.
2341
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002342Build
2343-----
2344
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002345- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2346 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002347
2348C API
2349-----
2350
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002351- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2352
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002353- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2354 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2355 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2356
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002357- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2358 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002359
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002360 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2361 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2362 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002363
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002364- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002365 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2366
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002367- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2368 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2369 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002370
2371New platforms
2372-------------
2373
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002374None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002375
2376Tests
2377-----
2378
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002379- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2380 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002381
2382Windows
2383-------
2384
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002385- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2386 function.
2387
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002388- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2389 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002390
2391Mac
2392---
2393
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002394- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2395 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002396
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002397- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2398 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002399
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002400- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2401 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2402 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002403
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002404- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002405 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2406 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002407
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002408- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2409 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002410
2411
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002412What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2413=================================
2414
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002415*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002416
2417Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002418-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002419
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002420- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2421 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2422 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2423
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002424- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2425 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2426 (SF patch #664376.)
2427
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002428- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2429 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2430 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2431 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2432 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2433 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002434 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002435
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002436- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2437 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2438 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2439 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002440 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002441
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002442- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2443 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2444 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2445 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2446 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2447 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2448 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2449 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2450 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2451 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2452 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2453
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002454- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2455 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2456 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2457 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2458 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2459 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2460
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002461- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2462 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2463
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002464- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2465 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2466 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2467 case.)
2468
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002469- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2470 passed as unicode strings.
2471
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002472- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2473 See SF bug #683467.
2474
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002475- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2476 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2477
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002478- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2479
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002480- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2481
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002482- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2483 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2484 arguments.
2485
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002486- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2487 See SF bug #667147.
2488
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002489- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002490 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002491 See SF bug #676155.
2492
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002493- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002494 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002495 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2496 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2497 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2498 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2499 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2500 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002501
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002502Extension modules
2503-----------------
2504
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002505- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2506 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2507 tp_as_number pointer.
2508
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002509- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2510 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2511 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2512 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2513 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2514
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002515- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2516
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002517- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2518
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002519- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002520 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002521 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2522 patch #678531.)
2523
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002524- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2525 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2526
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002527- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2528 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2529
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002530- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2531
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002532- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2533 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2534 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2535
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002536- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2537
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002538- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2539 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2540
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002541- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002542
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002543- datetime changes:
2544
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002545 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2546
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002547 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2548 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2549 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2550 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2551 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2552 now.
2553
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002554 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002555 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2556 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002557
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002558 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002559 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002560 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2561 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2562 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2563 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002564
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002565 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2566 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2567 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002568 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2569
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002570 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2571 by a later example coded by Guido.
2572
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002573 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002574 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2575 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2576 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002577 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2578 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2579
2580 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2581 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2582 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2583 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2584 tzinfo subclass instance.
2585
2586 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2587 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2588 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2589 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2590 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2591 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2592 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2593 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002594
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002595 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2596 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2597 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2598 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2599 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002600 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2601
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002602 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002603
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002604 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2605 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2606 as a naive datetime object.
2607
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002608 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2609 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2610 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2611
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002612 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2613 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2614 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2615 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2616 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2617 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2618 comparison.
2619
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002620 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2621 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2622 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2623 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002624 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002625
2626 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002627
2628 and ::
2629
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002630 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2631
2632 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2633 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2634 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2635 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2636
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002637 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2638 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2639 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2640 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2641 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2642
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002643 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2644 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002645 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2646 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002647
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002648Library
2649-------
2650
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002651- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2652 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2653
2654- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2655 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2656 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2657 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2658 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2659 See PEP 307 for details.
2660
2661- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2662 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2663
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002664- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2665 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002666 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002667 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2668 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002669 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002670
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002671- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2672 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2673
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002674- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2675 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2676 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2677
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002678- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2679
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002680- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2681 exception.
2682
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002683- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2684 class.
2685
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002686- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2687 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2688 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2689
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002690- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2691 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2692
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002693- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002694 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2695 See SF bug #659228.
2696
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002697- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2698 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2699 See SF patch #651082.
2700
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002701- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002702
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002703- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2704 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2705
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002706- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002707 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002708
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002709- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2710 DOS paths from other platforms.
2711
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002712Tools/Demos
2713-----------
2714
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002715- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2716 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2717 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2718 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2719 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2720 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2721 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2722 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2723 example:
2724
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002725 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2726 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002727
2728 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2729
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002730
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002731Build
2732-----
2733
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002734- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2735 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2736 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002737 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2738
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002739 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2740
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002741- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2742 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2743 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2744 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2745 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2746 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2747 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2748 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2749 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2750
2751- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2752 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2753 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2754 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2755
2756- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2757 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2758
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002759C API
2760-----
2761
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002762- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2763 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002764
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002765- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2766 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2767 tp_as_number pointer.
2768
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002769- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2770 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2771 (SF #681367)
2772
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002773- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2774 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2775 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2776 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002777
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002778Tests
2779-----
2780
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002781- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002782 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2783 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2784 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2785 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2786 pydoc.)
2787
2788- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2789
2790- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002791
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002792Windows
2793-------
2794
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002795- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2796 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2797 time).
2798
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002799- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2800 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2801
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002802- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2803 release without strong cryptography.
2804
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002805- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002806 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002807
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002808- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2809 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2810
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002811Mac
2812---
2813
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002814- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2815 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002816
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002817- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2818 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2819 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002820
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002821- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2822 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002823
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002824- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2825 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2826 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2827 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002828
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002829- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002830 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2831 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2832 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002833
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002834
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002835What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002836=================================
2837
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002838*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002839
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002840Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002841--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002842
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002843- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2844
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002845- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2846 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002847 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002848 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002849 a different meaning than before.
2850
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002851- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002852 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002853 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002854
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002855- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002856 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002857 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002858
2859- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2860 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2861 and deallocation.
2862
2863- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2864 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2865
2866- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2867 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2868 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2869 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2870 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2871
2872- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2873 now detected by the garbage collector.
2874
2875- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2876 [SF bug 519621]
2877
2878- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2879 identifier.
2880
2881- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2882 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2883 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2884 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2885 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2886 [SF bug 563060]
2887
2888- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2889 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2890 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2891 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2892 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2893
2894- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2895 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2896 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2897
2898- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2899
2900- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2901 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2902 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2903 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2904 state of the slots would be lost.)
2905
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002906Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002907-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002908
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002909- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002910 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2911 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2912 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2913 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002914 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2915 Jython 2.1.
2916
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002917- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002918 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002919 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2920 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2921 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2922 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2923 these, see PEP 302.
2924
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002925- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2926 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2927 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2928
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002929- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2930 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2931 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2932
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002933- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2934 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2935 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2936
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002937- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2938 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2939 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2940 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2941 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2942 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2943 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2944 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2945 releases or implementations.
2946
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002947- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002948 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2949 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002950
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002951- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2952 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2953
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002954- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2955 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2956 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2957
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002958- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2959 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2960
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002961- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2962 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002963 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2964 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002965
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002966- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2967 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2968 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2969 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2970 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2971
2972 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2973 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2974 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2975 pattern.
2976
2977 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2978 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2979 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2980 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2981
2982 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2983 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2984 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2985 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2986 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2987 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2988
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002989- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2990 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2991 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2992 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2993 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2994 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2995 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2996 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002997
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002998- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2999 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3000 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3001 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3002 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003003 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3004 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3005 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3006 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3007 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3008 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3009 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003010
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003011- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3012 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3013
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003014- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3015 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3016 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3017 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3018 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3019 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3020 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3021 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3022 to Zack Weinberg!
3023
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003024- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3025 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3026 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3027 type. This has been fixed now.
3028
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003029- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3030 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3031 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3032
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003033- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3034 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3035 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3036 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3037 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3038 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3039 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3040 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003041 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003042
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003043- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3044 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3045 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003046
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003047- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3048 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3049 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3050 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3051 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3052 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3053 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3054 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003055 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003056 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3057 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3058
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003059- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3060 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3061 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3062 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3063 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3064 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3065 this.)
3066
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003067- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3068 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003069 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003070 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003071 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3072 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003073 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3074 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003075
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003076- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3077 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3078 currently running.
3079
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003080- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3081 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3082 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3083 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3084
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003085- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3086 as directory names.
3087
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003088- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3089 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3090
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003091- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3092 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3093
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003094- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003095 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3096 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003097
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003098- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3099 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3100 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3101 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3102 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3103
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003104- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3105 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3106 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3107 removed.
3108
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003109- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3110 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3111 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3112
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003113- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3114 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3115 to __debug__.
3116
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003117- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3118 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3119 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3120
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003121- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3122 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3123 deprecated now.
3124
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003125- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3126 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3127 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003128
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003129- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3130 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3131 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3132 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3133 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003134
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003135- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3136 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3137
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003138- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3139 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3140 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003141 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003142 is backward compatible.
3143
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003144- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3145 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3146 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3147 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3148 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3149
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003150- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3151 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3152 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3153 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3154 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3155 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003156
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003157- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3158 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3159
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003160- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3161 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3162
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003163- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3164 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3165 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3166 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3167 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3168
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003169- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3170 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3171 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3172
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003173- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003174 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3175
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003176- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3177 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3178 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003179
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003180- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3181 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3182
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003183- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3184 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3185 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3186
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003187- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3188
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003189Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003190-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003191
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003192- Added three operators to the operator module:
3193 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3194 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3195 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3196
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003197- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3198
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003199- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3200 archives.
3201
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003202- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3203 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3204 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3205
3206 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3207
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003208- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3209 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3210 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003211 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003212
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003213- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3214 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3215 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3216 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003217 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3218 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3219 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3220 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003221
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003222- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3223 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003224
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003225- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3226
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003227- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3228 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3229
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003230- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3231 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3232 supported.
3233
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003234- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3235
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003236- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3237 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003238
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003239- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3240 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3241
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003242- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3243
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003244- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3245 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3246
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003247- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3248 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3249 functions but callable type objects.
3250
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003251- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003252 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003253 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003254
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003255- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3256 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003257
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003258- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3259 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003260
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003261- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3262 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3263 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3264 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3265
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003266- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3267 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003268
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003269- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3270 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3271 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3272 and __imul__.
3273
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003274- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003275 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3276 is called.
3277
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003278- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3279 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3280 interpreter was compiled.
3281
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003282- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3283 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3284 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003285 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003286 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3287 1, not 2.
3288
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003289- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3290 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3291 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3292 limit.
3293
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003294- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3295 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3296 bug #623464.
3297
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003298- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3299 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3300 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3301 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3302
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003303Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003304-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003305
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003306- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3307
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003308- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3309 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3310 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3311 with Python 2.3a2.
3312
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003313- os.path exposes getctime.
3314
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003315- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003316 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003317 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003318 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003319 unit tests of floating point results.
3320
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003321- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3322 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3323 has been increased.
3324
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003325- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3326 executed.
3327
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003328- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3329 postinstallation script.
3330
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003331- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3332 test the current module.
3333
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003334- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003335 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3336 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3337 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3338 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3339
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003340- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003341 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003342 Ward's Optik package.
3343
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003344- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3345 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3346 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3347 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3348
3349- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3350 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003351 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003352
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003353- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3354 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3355 shelf are binary pickles.
3356
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003357- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3358 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3359
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003360- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3361 modules are iterators now.
3362
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003363- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3364 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3365 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3366 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3367 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3368 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003369
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003370- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3371 with their entity value.
3372
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003373- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3374
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003375- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3376 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003377
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003378- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3379 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003380 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003381
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003382- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3383 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3384 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3385 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3386 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3387 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3388 main():
3389
3390 import locale
3391 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3392
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003393- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3394 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3395
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003396- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3397 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3398 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3399 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3400 to the new standard.
3401
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003402- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3403 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3404 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3405 an extension to the database.
3406
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003407- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3408 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3409 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3410 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003411 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003412
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003413- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003414 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003415
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003416- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3417 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3418 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3419 bounded integers.
3420
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003421- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3422 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3423 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3424 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3425 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3426 in existence.
3427
3428 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3429 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3430 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3431 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3432 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3433 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3434
3435 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3436 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3437 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3438 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3439
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003440- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3441 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3442 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3443
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003444- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3445
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003446- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3447 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3448 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3449 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3450
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003451- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3452 argument.
3453
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003454- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3455 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3456 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3457 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3458 [SF patch 560794].
3459
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003460- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3461 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3462 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003463 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3464 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3465 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003466
3467- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3468 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003469
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003470- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3471 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3472 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3473 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003474
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003475- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3476 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3477 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3478 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3479 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3480
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003481- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003482
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003483- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3484
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003485- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3486 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3487 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3488 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3489 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3490 identical to None.
3491
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003492- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3493 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3494 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3495 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3496 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3497 results now.
3498
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003499- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3500 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3501
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003502- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3503 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3504 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3505 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3506 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3507 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3508 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3509 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3510
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003511- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3512
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003513- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3514 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3515
3516- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3517 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3518 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3519 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3520 and other systems.
3521
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003522- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3523 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3524 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3525 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 +00003526 work well with these.
3527
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003528- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3529
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003530- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003531 connections.
3532
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003533- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3534 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3535 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3536
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003537- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3538 sets
3539
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003540- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3541 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3542 name.
3543
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003544- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3545 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3546 passed in.
3547
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003548- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003549 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003550 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3551 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003552
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003553- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3554
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003555- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3556
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003557- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3558 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3559 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3560
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003561- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3562 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3563 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3564 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003565 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003566
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003567- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003568 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003569 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003570
3571- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3572 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3573 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3574
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003575- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003576 the value of its expression argument.
3577
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003578- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3579 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3580 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3581
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003582- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3583 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3584 skipstone browser was included.
3585
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003586- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3587 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3588
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003589Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003590-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003591
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003592- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3593 names in addition to accepting file names.
3594
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003595- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3596 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3597 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3598 still used and useful.)
3599
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003600- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3601 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3602 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3603 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003604
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003605- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3606 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3607 the generated binary.
3608
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003609Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003610-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003611
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003612- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3613
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003614- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3615 except in the hands of experts.
3616
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003617- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003618 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3619 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3620 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003621
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003622- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3623 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3624 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3625 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3626 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3627 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3628 builds.
3629
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003630- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3631 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3632 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3633 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3634 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3635 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3636 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3637 new type.
3638
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003639- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003640
3641 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3642 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3643 positive infinities.
3644
3645 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3646 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3647 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3648 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3649 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3650 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3651 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3652
3653 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3654
3655 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3656
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003657- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3658 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3659 size of the executable.
3660
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003661- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3662 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3663 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3664 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003665
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003666- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3667
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003668- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3669 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3670 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003671
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003672- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3673 well as Unix.
3674
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003675- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3676 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3677 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3678 modules in the README file for details.
3679
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003680C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003681-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003682
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003683- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3684 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003685 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003686 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003687 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003688
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003689- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3690 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3691 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3692 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3693 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3694 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003695 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003696 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3697 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3698 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3699 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3700 aligned.)
3701
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003702- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3703 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3704 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3705
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003706- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3707 level.
3708
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003709- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3710 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3711 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3712 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3713 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3714
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003715- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3716 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3717 code.
3718
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003719- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3720 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3721 adjusting for negative indices.
3722
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003723- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3724 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3725 object.
3726
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003727- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3728 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3729 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3730
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003731- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3732 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003733
3734- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3735
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003736- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3737 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3738 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3739 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3740
3741- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3742
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003743- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003744
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003745- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003746 without going through the buffer API.
3747
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003748- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003749
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003750- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3751 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3752 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3753 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3754
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003755- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3756 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3757
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003758- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003759 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3760
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003761New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003762-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003763
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003764- OpenVMS is now supported.
3765
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003766- AtheOS is now supported.
3767
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003768- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3769
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003770- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3771
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003772Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003773-----
3774
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003775- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3776 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3777 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003778
3779Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003780-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003781
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003782- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3783 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3784 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3785 bugs.
3786 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003787 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003788 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3789 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003790 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003791
3792- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003793 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003794
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003795- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3796 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3797
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003798- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3799 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003800 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003801 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3802
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003803- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3804 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3805 use files" uninstall option).
3806
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003807- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3808
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003809- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3810 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3811
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003812- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3813 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3814 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3815
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003816- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3817 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3818 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3819 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3820 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003821 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3822 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3823 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003824
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003825- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003826 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003827 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3828 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3829 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3830 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3831 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3832 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3833 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3834 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3835 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3836 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3837 work around.
3838
3839- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3840 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3841 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3842 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3843 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3844 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3845 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3846 specified with O_CREAT too).
3847
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003848Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003849----
3850
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003851- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003852
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003853- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3854 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3855 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3856
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003857- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3858 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3859 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3860
3861- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3862 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3863 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3864 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3865 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3866 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3867 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3868 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003869
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003870- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3871 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3872 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003873
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003874- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3875 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3876 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3877 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3878 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003879
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003880- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3881 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3882 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003883
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003884- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3885 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003886
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003887- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3888 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3889 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3890 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3891 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003892
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003893- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3894 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3895 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3896
3897- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3898 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3899 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003900
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003901- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3902 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3903 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3904 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003905 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003906
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003907- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3908 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003909
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003910- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3911 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003912
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003913- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003914 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003915 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3916 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003917
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003918
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003919What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003920===============================
3921
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003922*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3923
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003924Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003925--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003926
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003927- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3928 with a custom metaclass.
3929
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003930Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003931-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003932
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003933- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3934 are proxies.
3935
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003936Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003937-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003938
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003939- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3940 very short strings.
3941
3942- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3943 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3944 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3945 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3946 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3947
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003948Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003949-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003950
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003951- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3952 close or delete time).
3953
3954- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3955 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3956
3957- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3958
3959- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003960 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003961
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003962Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003963-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003964
3965Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003966-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003967
3968C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003969-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003970
3971New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003972-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003973
3974Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003975-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003976
3977Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003978-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003979
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003980- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3981
3982- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3983 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3984
3985- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3986 deleted at process exit time.
3987
3988- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3989 in backslash.
3990
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003991Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003992----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003993
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003994- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3995 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3996 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3997
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003998
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003999What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004000===========================
4001
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004002*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4003
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004004Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004005--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004006
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004007- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4008 been extensively updated. See
4009
4010 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4011
4012 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4013
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004014- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4015 deleted!
4016
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004017- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4018 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4019 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4020 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4021 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4022
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004023- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4024
4025 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4026 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4027
4028 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4029 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4030 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4031 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4032 supported anyway.
4033
4034 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4035 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4036
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004037- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4038 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4039 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4040 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4041 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004042
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004043- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4044 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4045 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4046
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004047Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004048-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004049
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004050- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4051 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4052 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4053 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4054 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4055 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004056 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4057 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4058 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4059 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004060
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004061- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4062 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4063 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4064
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004065Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004066-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004067
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004068- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4069
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004070Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004071-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004072
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004073- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4074 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4075 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4076 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4077 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4078 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4079
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004080- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4081
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004082- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4083
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004084- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4085
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004086- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4087 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4088 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4089
4090- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4091
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004092Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004093-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004094
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004095- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4096 off a search on Google.
4097
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004098Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004099-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004100
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004101- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4102 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4103 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4104 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4105 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4106 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4107 other platforms should do likewise.
4108
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004109- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4110 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4111 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4112
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004113C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004114-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004115
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004116- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4117 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4118 producing key-value pairs.
4119
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004120- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004121 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004122 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4123 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4124 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4125 previously went unchallenged.
4126
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004127New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004128-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004129
4130Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004131-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004132
4133Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004134-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004135
4136Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004137----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004138
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004139- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4140 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004141
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004142- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4143 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4144 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4145 home.
4146
4147
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004148What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004149===========================
4150
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004151*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4152
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004153Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004154--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004155
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004156- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4157 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004158
4159 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004160 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004161
4162 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4163 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004164 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004165 This needs to be documented.
4166
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004167- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4168 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4169
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004170- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4171 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4172 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4173
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004174- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4175 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4176
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004177- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4178 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4179 class forbids it).
4180
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004181- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4182 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4183 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4184
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004185- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4186
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004187Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004188-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004189
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004190- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4191 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004192 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004193
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004194- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4195 (like 1 + '').
4196
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004197Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004198-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004199
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004200- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4201 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4202 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4203 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004204 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004205 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4206
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004207- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4208 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4209 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4210 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4211
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004212- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4213 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004214 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4215 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4216 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004217
4218- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4219 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004220
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004221- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4222 bytes on its input.
4223
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004224Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004225-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004226
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004227- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004228 convenience function.
4229
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004230- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4231 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4232 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004233 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4234 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4235 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4236 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4237 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4238 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004239
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004240- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4241 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4242 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4243 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4244
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004245- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4246 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4247 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4248
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004249- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4250 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4251 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4252 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4253
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004254- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4255 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004256 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004257 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4258 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4259 new -l and -e options.
4260
4261- statcache is now deprecated.
4262
4263- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4264 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004265 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004266 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4267 time properly taken into account.
4268
4269- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4270 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4271 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4272 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4273
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004274Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004275-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004276
4277Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004278-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004279
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004280- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4281 is built with libdb3 if available.
4282
4283- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4284
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004285C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004286-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004287
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004288- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4289 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4290 PySequence_Size().
4291
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004292- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4293
4294- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4295 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4296 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4297
4298- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4299 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4300
4301- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4302 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4303
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004304New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004305-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004306
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004307- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4308 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4309
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004310- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4311 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4312
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004313- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4314
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004315Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004316-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004317
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004318- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4319 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4320
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004321Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004322-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004323
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004324Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004325----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004326
4327- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4328 removed completely in the next release.
4329
4330- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4331 OSX.
4332
4333- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4334 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4335
4336- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4337
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004338
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004339What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004340===========================
4341
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004342*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4343
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004344Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004345--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004346
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004347- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004348 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004349 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004350 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4351 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004352 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4353 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004354 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4355 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004356
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004357- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4358 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4359
4360- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4361 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4362
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004363Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004364-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004365
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004366- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4367 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4368 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4369 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4370 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4371 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4372 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4373 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4374
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004375- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4376 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4377 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4378 example).
4379
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004380- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004381 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004382 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004383 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004384
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004385- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4386 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4387 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004388 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004389
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004390- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4391 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4392 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4393 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4394 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4395 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4396
4397 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4398
4399 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4400
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004401Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004402-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004403
4404- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4405
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004406- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4407
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004408- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4409 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004410
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004411- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4412 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4413 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4414 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4415 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4416 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004417 attributes.
4418
4419- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4420 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4421 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004422
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004423- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4424 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4425 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004426
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004427- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4428 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4429 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004430 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4431 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4432
4433- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4434 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004435
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004436Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004437-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004438
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004439- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4440 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4441
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004442- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4443 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4444 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4445 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4446
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004447- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4448 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4449 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4450 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4451
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004452 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4453 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4454 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4455 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4456 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4457 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4458 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4459 without losing information).
4460
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004461- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004462 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4463 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4464 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4465 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4466 module).
4467
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004468 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004469 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4470 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4471 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4472 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004473
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004474- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004475 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4476 encoding.
4477
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004478- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4479 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4480
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004481- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004482 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4483
4484- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4485 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4486 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4487 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4488
4489- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4490
4491- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4492 ON, and OFF.
4493
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004494- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4495 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4496
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004497Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004498-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004499
4500- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4501 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4502 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004503
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004504- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4505 been added: -X and -E.
4506
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004507Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004508-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004509
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004510- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4511 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4512
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004513C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004514-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004515
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004516- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4517 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4518 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4519 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4520 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4521
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004522- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4523 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4524 as long) arguments.
4525
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004526- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4527 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4528 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4529 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4530 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4531 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4532
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004533- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4534 input.
4535
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004536New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004537-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004538
4539Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004541
4542Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004543-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004544
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004545- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4546 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4547 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4548
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004549- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4550 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4551 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004552 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004553
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004554 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4555 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4556 import signal
4557 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004558
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004559 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004560 while 1:
4561 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004562 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004563 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4564 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4565 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4566 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004567
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004568
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004569What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4570===========================
4571
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004572*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4573
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004574Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004575--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004576
4577- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4578 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4579 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4580
4581- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4582 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4583 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4584 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4585 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4586 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4587 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004588
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004589- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004590 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004591 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4592 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4593 associate a docstring with a property.
4594
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004595- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4596 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4597 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4598 other built-in object types.
4599
4600- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4601 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4602 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4603 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4604 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4605
4606- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4607 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4608
4609- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4610 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004611 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004612 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4613 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4614 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4615 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4616 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4617
4618- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4619 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4620 class.
4621
4622- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4623 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4624 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4625 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4626
4627- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4628 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4629 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4630 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4631
4632- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4633 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4634
4635- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4636 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4637 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4638 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4639 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004640 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004641 with the same value as s.
4642
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004643- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4644
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004645Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004646----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004647
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004648- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4649
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004650- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4651 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4652 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4653 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4654 objects.
4655
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004656- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4657 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004658 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4659 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4660
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004661- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4662 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4663 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4664
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004665Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004666-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004667
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004668- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4669 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4670 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4671 by the instances.
4672
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004673- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4674 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4675 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4676
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004677- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4678 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4679 before the entire comparison is complete.
4680
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004681- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4682 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4683 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4684
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004685- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4686 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4687 getwriter().
4688
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004689- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4690 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4691
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004692- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004693 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4694 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4695
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004696- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4697 iterable object.
4698
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004699- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4700 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004701
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004702- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4703 authentication.
4704
4705- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4706 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004707
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004708- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004709 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4710 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4711 a sample driver.)
4712
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004713Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004714-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004715
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004716- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4717 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4718 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4719 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4720 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4721 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4722 kernel has large file support.
4723
4724- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4725 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4726 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4727 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4728 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4729
4730- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4731 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4732 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4733
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004734C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004735-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004736
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004737- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4738 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4739
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004740New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004741-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004742
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004743- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4744 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4745
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004746Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004747-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004748
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004749- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4750 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4751 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4752 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4753 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4754
4755- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4756 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4757 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4758 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4759
4760- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4761 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4762
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004763Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004764-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004765
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004766- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004767 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4768 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004769
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004770
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004771What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4772===========================
4773
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004774*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4775
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004776Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004777----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004778
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004779- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4780 big to represent as a C double.
4781
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004782- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4783 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4784 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4785 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4786 restriction).
4787
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004788- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4789 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4790 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4791 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4792 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4793
4794 >>> dir([])
4795 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4796 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4797 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4798 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4799 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4800 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4801 'reverse', 'sort']
4802
4803 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4804
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004805- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004806 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4807 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4808 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4809 OverflowError exception.
4810
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004811- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004812 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004813 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4814 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4815 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4816 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4817 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004818 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004819 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4820 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4821
4822 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4823 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4824 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4825 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004826
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004827- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004828 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4829 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4830 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4831 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4832 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4833 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4834 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4835 once it is created.
4836
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004837- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4838 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4839 (key, value) pairs.
4840
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004841- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004842 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4843 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4844
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004845- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4846 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4847 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4848 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4849 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004850
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004851- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004852 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4853 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4854
4855 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4856
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004857- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004858 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4859
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004860Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004861-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004862
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004863- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004864 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4865 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004866
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004867- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4868 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4869 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4870 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4871 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4872 in this area anymore).
4873
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004874- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4875 threading.Timer.
4876
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004877- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4878 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4879
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004880- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004881 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4882
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004883- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004884 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4885 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4886 converted to Python longs.
4887
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004888- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004889 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4890
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004891- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4892 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4893 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4894
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004895Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004896-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004897
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004898- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4899 division operators as per PEP 238.
4900
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004901Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004902-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004903
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004904- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4905 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4906 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4907 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4908
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004909C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004910-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004911
4912- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004913
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004914- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4915 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004916 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004917
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004918 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4919 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004920 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004921 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004922
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004923- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004924 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4925 module:
4926
4927 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004928
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004929 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4930 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004931
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004932 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4933 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004934
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004935 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4936
4937 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4938
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004939- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004940 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4941 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4942 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004943
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004944New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004945-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004946
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004947- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4948 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4949 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4950 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4951 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004952
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004953Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004954-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004955
4956Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004957-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004958
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004959- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4960 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4961 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4962 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004963 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4964 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4965 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4966 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4967 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004968
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004969- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004970 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4971
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004972
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004973What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4974===========================
4975
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004976*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4977
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004978Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004979-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004980
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004981- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4982 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4983
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004984- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4985 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4986 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004987
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004988- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4989 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4990 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4991 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004992
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004993- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4994
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004995- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004996
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004997Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004998-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004999
5000- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005001 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005002 the module docstring for details.
5003
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005004Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005005-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005006
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005007- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005008 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5009 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5010 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005011
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005012- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5013 Nick Mathewson.
5014
5015Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005016----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005017
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005018- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5019 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5020 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5021 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5022 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5023 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5024 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5025 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5026
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005027- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5028 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5029 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5030 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5031
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005032- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5033 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5034 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5035 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5036 come a long way).
5037
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005038- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5039 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5040 write filters for these warnings).
5041
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005042- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5043 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5044 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5045 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5046 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5047
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005048- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5049 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5050 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5051 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5052 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5053 older distribution.
5054
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005055Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005056-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005057
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005058- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5059 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005060 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005061
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005062- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5063 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5064 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5065
5066- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5067
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005068- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5069
5070- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5071
5072- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5073
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005074- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005075
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005076- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5077
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005078New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005079-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005080
5081C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005082-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005083
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005084- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5085 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5086 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5087 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5088 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5089 against buffer overruns.
5090
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005091- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005092 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5093 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005094 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5095 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5096 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5097
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005098- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5099 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5100 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5101 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5102 deprecated.
5103
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005104Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005105-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005106
5107- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5108 relevant is found.
5109
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005110
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005111What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005112===========================
5113
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005114*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5115
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005116Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005117----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005118
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005119- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5120 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5121 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5122 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5123 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5124 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5125 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5126 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005127 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005128 repaired.
5129
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005130- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005131 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005132 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5133 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5134 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5135 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5136 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5137 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5138 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5139 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5140
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005141- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5142 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5143 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5144 leading BMO character).
5145
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005146- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5147 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5148 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5149
5150 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5151 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5152 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005153
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005154 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5155 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5156 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5157 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5158 for various simple to use conversions.
5159
5160 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5161 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5162
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005163 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5164 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5165 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5166 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5167 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5168 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5169 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5170 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5171 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5172 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5173 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5174 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5175 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5176 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5177 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005178
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005179- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5180 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5181 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005182 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005183 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005184
5185 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005186 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5187 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5188 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5189 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5190 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005191 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5192 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005193
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005194 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5195 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5196 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005197 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005198
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005199- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5200 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5201 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5202 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5203 floating arithmetic,
5204
5205 x = 9007199254740992.0
5206 print long(x)
5207
5208 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5209 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5210 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5211 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5212 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5213 functions are of good quality).
5214
5215 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5216 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5217 algorithms to break.
5218
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005219- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5220 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5221 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5222 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5223 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5224 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5225 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5226 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5227 order.
5228
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005229- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5230 operation along the most common code paths.
5231
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005232- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5233 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5234
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005235- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5236 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5237 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5238 {}.update(UserDict())
5239
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005240- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5241 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5242 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5243 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5244 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5245 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5246 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5247 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5248
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005249- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005250 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005251
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005252 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005253 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5254 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005255 join() method of strings
5256 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005257 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5258 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005259 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005260 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005261
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005262- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5263 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5264
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005265- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5266 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5267
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005268- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5269 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5270 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5271 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5272
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005273- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5274 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005275 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005276 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5277 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005278
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005279- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5280
5281
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005282Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005283-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005284
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005285- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005286 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005287 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5288 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5289
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005290- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5291 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5292
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005293- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5294 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5295 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5296 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5297
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005298- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5299 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5300 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5301
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005302- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5303
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005304- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5305
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005306- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5307 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5308 that are still imported into string.py).
5309
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005310- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5311
5312- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5313 Now it does.
5314
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005315- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5316
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005317- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5318 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5319 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5320 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5321 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005322 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5323 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005324
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005325- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5326 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5327 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5328 'help(object)'.
5329
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005330Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005331-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005332
5333- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005334 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005335 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5336 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5337
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005338- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005339 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5340 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005341
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005342C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005343-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005344
5345- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5346 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005347
5348----
5349
5350**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**