blob: 95b9d2c7a15b8149691d8712af51b3d2ccf95685 [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
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000020- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
21 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
22 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
23
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000024
25Library
26-------
27
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +000028- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
29
Raymond Hettinger4ebe3642004-12-05 04:55:14 +000030- the depecated statcache module was removed.
31
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +000032- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
33
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +000034- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
35
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +000036- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
37
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +000038- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
39 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
40 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
41
Raymond Hettinger784ab762004-12-04 10:50:51 +000042- the deprecated whrandom module was removed. Use the random module instead.
43
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000044- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000045 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000046
47
48Build
49-----
50
51
52C API
53-----
54
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +000055- Removed PyRange_New().
56
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000057
58Tests
59-----
60
61
62Mac
63---
64
65
66
67Tools/Demos
68-----------
69
70
71
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +000072What's New in Python 2.4 final?
73===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +000074
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +000075*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +000076
77Core and builtins
78-----------------
79
80- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
81 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
82 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
83
84
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +000085What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
86==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000087
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +000088*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000089
90Core and builtins
91-----------------
92
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +000093- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
94 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
95 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
96
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000097
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +000098Library
99-------
100
101- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
102 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
103 raised is re-raised.
104
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000105- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
106 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
107
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000108- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
109 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
110 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
111 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
112 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
113 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
114 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
115 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
116 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
117 by the slice are recomputed now.
118
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000119- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000120
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000121Build
122-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000123
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000124- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
125 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
126 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000127
128C API
129-----
130
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000131- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
132
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000133
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000134What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
135================================
136
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000137*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000138
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000139License
140-------
141
142The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
143is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
144changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
145Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
146intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
147durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
148the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
149License::
150
151 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
152
153says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
154to Python 2.1.1.
155
156The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
157License Version 2.
158
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000159Core and builtins
160-----------------
161
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000162- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
163 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
164 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
165 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
166 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
167 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
168 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
169 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
170 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
171 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
172
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000173- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000174
175Extension Modules
176-----------------
177
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000178- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
179 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
180 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
181 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000182
183Library
184-------
185
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000186- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
187 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
188 returned.
189
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000190- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
191
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000192- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
193 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
194
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000195- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
196
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000197- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
198 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000199
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000200- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
201
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000202- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
203
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000204- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000205 the source code is updated and reloaded.
206
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000207Build
208-----
209
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000210- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000211
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000212What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
213================================
214
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000215*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000216
217Core and builtins
218-----------------
219
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000220- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000221 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
222
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000223- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
224 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
225 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
226 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
227
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000228- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
229 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
230
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000231- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
232 constant.
233
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000234- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
235 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
236 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
237 large), and to anomalies such as
238 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
239 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
240 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
241 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000242
243Extension modules
244-----------------
245
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000246- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
247 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000248 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
249 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
250 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000251
252Library
253-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000254
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000255- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000256 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000257 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
258 --swig-cpp.
259
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000260- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
261 it is set.
262
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000263- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000264
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000265- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
266 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
267 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
268 Closes bug #1039270.
269
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000270- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000271
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000272 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000273 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
274 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
275 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
276 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
277 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
278 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
279 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
280 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
281 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
282 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
283 + Updates to documentation.
284
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000285- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
286 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
287 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
288 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
289
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000290- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000291
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000292- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
293 applications should use the getmember function.
294
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000295- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
296
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000297- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
298 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
299 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
300 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
301 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
302 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
303 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
304 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
305 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
306
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000307- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
308 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000309 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000310
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000311- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
312 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
313 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
314 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
315 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
316 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
317 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
318 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000319
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000320- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
321 the new public features (of which there are many).
322
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000323- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000324 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
325 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
326 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
327 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000328 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000329
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000330- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
331
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000332- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
333 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
334 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
335 options.
336
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000337- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
338 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
339 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
340 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
341 conditions under which non-string values work.
342
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000343Build
344-----
345
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000346- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
347 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
348 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
349
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000350- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
351 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
352 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
353 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
354 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000355
356C API
357-----
358
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000359- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
360 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
361
362- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
363
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000364- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
365 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
366 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
367 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
368 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
369 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
370 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
371 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
372 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
373
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000374- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
375
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000376- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
377 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
378 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000379
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000380Tests
381-----
382
383- test__locale ported to unittest
384
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000385Mac
386---
387
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000388- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
389 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
390 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000391
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000392Tools/Demos
393-----------
394
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000395- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
396 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
397 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
398 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
399 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000400
401
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000402What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
403=================================
404
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000405*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000406
407Core and builtins
408-----------------
409
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000410- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000411 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
412
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000413- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
414 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
415 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
416 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
417 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
418 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
419 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
420 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000421 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
422 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
423 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
424 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
425 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000426
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000427- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
428 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
429 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
430 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
431 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
432
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000433- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
434
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000435- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
436 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
437
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000438- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
439 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
440 modified the list.
441
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000442- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
443 functions is now writable.
444
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000445- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
446 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
447 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
448 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
449
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000450- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
451 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
452 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
453 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
454 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000455
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000456- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
457 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
458
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000459Extension modules
460-----------------
461
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000462- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
463
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000464- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
465 data.
466
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000467- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
468 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
469 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
470 supposed to have been truncated away.
471
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000472- Added socket.socketpair().
473
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000474- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
475 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
476
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000477- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000478 versions of Python, have now been removed.
479
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000480Library
481-------
482
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000483- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000484 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000485
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000486- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
487 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
488
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000489- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
490 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
491
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000492- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
493
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000494- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
495 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000496
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000497- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
498 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
499
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000500- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
501
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000502- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
503
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000504- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
505
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000506- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
507 Percivall.
508
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000509- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
510 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
511
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000512- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
513 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
514 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000515 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000516
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000517- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
518 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
519 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
520 and exponent.
521
522- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
523
524- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
525 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
526 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
527
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000528- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
529 to the readline module.
530
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000531- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000532 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
533 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000534
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000535- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
536 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
537 contains symlinks.
538
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000539- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
540 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
541
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000542- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
543 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
544 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
545
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000546- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
547 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
548 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
549 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
550 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
551 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
552 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
553 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
554 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
555 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
556 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
557 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
558 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
559
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000560- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
561
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000562Tools/Demos
563-----------
564
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000565- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
566 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
567
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000568- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
569
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000570Build
571-----
572
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000573- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
574 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
575 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
576 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
577 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
578 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
579 plans to do so.
580
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000581- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
582 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
583
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000584- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
585 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
586
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000587- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
588 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
589
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000590- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
591 GNU/k*BSD systems.
592
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000593- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
594 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
595
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000596C API
597-----
598
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000599..
600
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000601Documentation
602-------------
603
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000604- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
605 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
606
607- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
608 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
609 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000610
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000611New platforms
612-------------
613
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000614- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
615
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000616Tests
617-----
618
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000619..
620
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000621Windows
622-------
623
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000624- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
625 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
626 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
627 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
628 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
629 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
630 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
631 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
632 the problem.
633
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000634Mac
635---
636
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000637..
638
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000639
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000640What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
641=================================
642
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000643*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000644
645Core and builtins
646-----------------
647
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000648- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
649 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
650 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
651 sensitive code.
652
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000653- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000654 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000655
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000656 @staticmethod
657 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000658
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000659 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000660
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000661- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
662 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
663 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
664 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
665 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
666 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
667 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
668 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
669 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
670 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
671 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
672
673 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
674 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
675 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
676 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
677 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
678 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
679 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
680
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000681- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
682 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
683
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000684- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000685 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000686
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000687- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000688 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000689 which was missing for no apparent reason.
690
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000691- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000692 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
693 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
694
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000695- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
696 types that support garbage collection.
697
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000698- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
699
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000700- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
701 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
702 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
703 Jython.
704
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000705- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
706
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000707- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
708 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
709
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000710- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
711 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
712 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000713
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000714- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
715 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
716 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
717
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000718Extension modules
719-----------------
720
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000721- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
722
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000723Library
724-------
725
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000726- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
727 TIS-620
728
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000729- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
730 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
731 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
732 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
733 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
734 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
735 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
736 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
737 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
738 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
739
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000740- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
741
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000742- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
743 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
744 same as when the argument is omitted).
745 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
746
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000747- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
748
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000749- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
750 schemes are offered.
751
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000752- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
753
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000754- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
755 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
756 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
757
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000758- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
759
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000760- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
761 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
762
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000763- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
764 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
765 when dummy_threading is being used.
766
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000767- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
768 from a tarfile.
769
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000770- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000771 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000772
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000773- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
774 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
775 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
776 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
777
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000778- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
779 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
780
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000781- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
782 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
783 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
784 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
785 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
786 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
787 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
788 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
789 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
790 by some other method in progress).
791
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000792- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
793 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
794 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000795
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000796- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
797
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000798- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
799 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
800 AM Kuchling.
801
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000802- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
803 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
804 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
805
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000806- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
807 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
808 instead of unsigned.
809
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000810- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000811 no longer part of the public API.
812
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000813- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
814 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
815 string methods of the same name).
816
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000817- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000818 SF patch 945642.
819
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000820- doctest unittest integration improvements:
821
822 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
823
824 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
825 DocTestSuites.
826
827- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
828 that provide thread-local data.
829
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000830- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
831 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
832
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000833- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
834
835- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
836 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
837 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
838
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000839- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
840
841 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
842 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
843 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000844
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000845 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
846 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
847 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
848 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
849
850 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
851 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
852
853 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
854 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
855 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
856 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
857
858 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
859 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
860 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
861 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
862 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
863
864 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
865 wrapping help output.
866
867 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
868 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
869 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000870
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000871C API
872-----
873
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000874- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
875 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
876 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
877 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
878 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
879 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
880 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
881 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
882 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
883 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
884 its visible semantics have not changed.
885
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000886- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
887 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
888
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000889Documentation
890-------------
891
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000892- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000893
894 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000895 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000896
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000897 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000898
899 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
900
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000901- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000902
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000903Tests
904-----
905
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000906- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000907 platforms that use the Makefile.
908
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000909- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
910 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
911 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
912
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000913
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000914What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
915=================================
916
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000917*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000918
919Core and builtins
920-----------------
921
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000922- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
923 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
924 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
925 objects now (one object instead of three).
926
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000927- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
928 Windows DLLs.
929
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000930- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
931 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000932
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000933- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
934 a new .pyc magic.
935
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000936- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
937 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
938 be there.
939
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000940- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
941 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
942 the LC_NUMERIC category.
943
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000944- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
945 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
946 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
947
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000948- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
949
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000950- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
951 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
952 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000953
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000954- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
955 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
956
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000957- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
958
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000959- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000960 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000961
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000962- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
963
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000964- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
965
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000966- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
967 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
968
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000969- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
970 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
971 Fixes bug #858016 .
972
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000973- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
974 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
975 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
976
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000977- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
978 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
979 improves their performance (about 35%).
980
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000981- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
982 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
983 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
984
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000985- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
986 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
987 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
988 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
989
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000990- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
991 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
992 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
993 length is not known).
994
995- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
996 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000997 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
998 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000999 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1000
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001001- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1002 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1003
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001004- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1005 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1006 keyword arguments.
1007
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001008- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1009 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1010 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1011
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001012- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1013 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1014 cases.
1015
1016- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1017 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1018 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1019 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1020 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1021 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1022 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1023 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1024 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1025 a release build.
1026
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001027- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1028 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1029
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001030- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001031 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001032
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001033- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1034 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1035 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1036 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1037 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1038 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1039 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1040 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1041 destroyed.
1042
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001043- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1044 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1045 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1046 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1047 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1048 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1049 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1050 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1051
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001052- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1053 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1054 character other than a space.
1055
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001056- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1057 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1058 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1059 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1060 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1061 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1062 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1063 attributes with the same name.
1064
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001065- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1066 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1067 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1068 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1069 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1070 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1071 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1072 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1073 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1074 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1075 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1076 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1077 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1078 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001079
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001080- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1081 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1082 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1083 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1084 This has been repaired.
1085
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001086- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1087
1088- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1089
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001090- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1091 over a sequence.
1092
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001093- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001094 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001095
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001096- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1097
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001098- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1099 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1100 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1101 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1102 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1103 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1104 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1105 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1106
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001107- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1108 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1109 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1110
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001111- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1112 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1113 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1114 freelist.
1115
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001116- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1117 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1118
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001119- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1120 number.
1121
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001122- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1123 a TypeError exception.
1124
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001125- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1126 820195.
1127
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001128- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1129 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1130 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1131
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001132- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001133 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1134 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001135
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001136- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1137 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1138 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1139
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001140- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1141 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001142 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001143
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001144- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001145 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1146 the first call.
1147
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001148
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001149Extension modules
1150-----------------
1151
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001152- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1153 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1154
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001155- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1156 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1157 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1158 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1159 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1160 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1161 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001162
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001163- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1164
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001165- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1166
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001167- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1168 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1169
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001170- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1171 fewer false positives.
1172
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001173- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1174 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1175
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001176- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001177 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1178
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001179- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001180 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001181 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001182 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1183 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001184
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001185- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1186 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1187 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1188 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1189
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001190- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1191 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1192 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1193 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1194 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1195 #897625.
1196
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001197- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1198 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1199
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001200- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1201 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1202 and pops on either side of the deque.
1203
1204- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1205 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1206
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001207- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1208 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1209 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1210 other functions that expect a function argument.
1211
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001212- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1213
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001214- os.getsid was added.
1215
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001216- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1217 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1218 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1219
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001220- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1221
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001222- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1223
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001224- readline.clear_history was added.
1225
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001226- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1227
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001228- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1229
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001230- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1231
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001232- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1233
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001234- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1235
1236- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1237
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001238- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1239
1240- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1241
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001242- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1243 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1244 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1245
1246- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1247 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1248 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1249 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1250 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1251 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1252 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1253
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001254- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1255 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1256 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1257 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001258
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001259- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001260 iterators from a single iterable.
1261
1262- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1263 of raising a TypeError exception.
1264
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001265- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1266 as parameter.
1267
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001268Library
1269-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001270
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001271- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1272 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1273 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001274
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001275- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1276 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1277 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001278
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001279- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001280
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001281- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1282 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001283
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001284- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1285 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1286
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001287- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1288
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001289- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001290 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001291
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001292- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001293 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001294
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001295- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1296
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001297- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1298 on cygwin and mingw32.
1299
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001300- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1301
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001302- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1303 module.
1304
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001305- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1306 installation scheme for all platforms.
1307
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001308- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001309 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001310
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001311- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1312 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1313 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1314
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001315- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1316 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1317 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1318
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001319- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1320
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001321- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1322
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001323- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1324 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1325
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001326- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1327 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1328 type pattern with the same value exists.
1329
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001330- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1331 when run from the command prompt).
1332
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001333- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1334 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1335
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001336- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1337 default sort).
1338
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001339- Added global runctx function to profile module
1340
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001341- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1342
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001343- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1344
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001345- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1346
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001347- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001348 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1349 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1350 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1351 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1352 accordingly.
1353
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001354- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1355 decoding standards.
1356
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001357- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1358 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1359 called for all requests.
1360
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001361- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1362 they are passed to the compiler.
1363
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001364- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1365 indent, width and depth.
1366
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001367- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1368 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1369
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001370- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1371 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1372
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001373- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1374
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001375- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1376
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001377- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1378
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001379- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1380 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1381
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001382- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001383 for better performance.
1384
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001385- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001386
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001387- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1388 a string).
1389
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001390- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1391
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001392- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1393
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001394- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1395
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001396- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1397
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001398- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1399 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1400 list of fieldnames.
1401
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001402- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1403 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1404
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001405- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1406
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001407- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1408 empty lists.
1409
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001410- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1411 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1412 and shelves.
1413
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001414- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1415 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1416
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001417- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001418 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1419 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001420
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001421- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1422 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001423 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001424
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001425- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001426 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1427 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1428
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001429- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1430 and removed in Py2.4.
1431
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001432- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1433
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001434- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1435
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001436Tools/Demos
1437-----------
1438
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001439- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1440 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1441
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001442- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1443
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001444- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1445 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1446 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1447 destination in situations where both files are given.
1448
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001449- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1450 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1451 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1452 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1453
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001454- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1455
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001456- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1457 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1458 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1459 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1460 now.
1461
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001462- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1463 in effect
1464
1465- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1466 C-c C-h
1467
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001468- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1469 -d option was given.
1470
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001471Build
1472-----
1473
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001474- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1475 build under OS X.
1476
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001477- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1478 --enable-profiling.
1479
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001480- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1481 is configured --with-tsc.
1482
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001483- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1484 on AMD64.
1485
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001486- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1487 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1488
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001489- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1490 removed.
1491
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001492- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1493 supported (see PEP 11).
1494
1495- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1496
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001497- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1498
1499- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1500 (see PEP 11).
1501
1502- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1503 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1504
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001505C API
1506-----
1507
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001508- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1509 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1510 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1511
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001512- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1513 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1514 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1515 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1516
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001517- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1518 generator objects.
1519
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001520- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1521 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001522 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1523 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001524
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001525- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1526 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1527
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001528- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1529 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1530 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1531 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1532 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1533
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001534- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1535 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1536 about 10% faster.
1537
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001538- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1539 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1540
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001541- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1542 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1543 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1544 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1545
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001546Windows
1547-------
1548
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001549- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1550 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1551 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1552 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1553
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001554- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1555 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1556 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1557
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001558
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001559What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1560===============================
1561
1562*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1563
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001564IDLE
1565----
1566
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001567- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1568 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1569 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1570 context-menu actions.
1571
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001572- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1573 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1574 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1575 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1576 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1577 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1578 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1579 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1580 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1581
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001582
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001583What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1584=============================================
1585
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001586*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001587
1588Core and builtins
1589-----------------
1590
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001591- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001592 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001593 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1594
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001595Extension modules
1596-----------------
1597
1598- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1599 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1600 than once. This has been fixed.
1601
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001602- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1603 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1604 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1605 call.
1606
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001607- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1608
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001609Library
1610-------
1611
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001612- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1613 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1614
1615- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1616 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1617 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1618 restored.
1619
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001620IDLE
1621----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001622
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001623- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001624
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001625Build
1626-----
1627
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001628- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1629 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1630
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001631C API
1632-----
1633
1634Windows
1635-------
1636
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001637- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1638 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1639
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001640- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1641
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001642Mac
1643---
1644
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001645- Various fixes to pimp.
1646
1647- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1648
1649- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1650 more problems than it solves.
1651
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001652
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001653What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1654=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001655
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001656*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1657
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001658Core and builtins
1659-----------------
1660
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001661- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1662 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1663
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001664- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1665 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001666 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001667
1668- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1669 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1670 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001671 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001672
1673- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1674 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001675
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001676- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1677 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1678 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1679
1680- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001681 770247.
1682
1683- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001684
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001685Extension modules
1686-----------------
1687
1688- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1689 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1690
1691- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1692
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001693- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1694
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001695- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1696 contained within the _strptime module.
1697
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001698- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1699 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1700
1701- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001702 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1703
1704- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1705 the find_class attribute, if present.
1706
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001707- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001708
1709 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1710 (SF bug 763298).
1711
1712 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001713 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1714 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1715 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001716
1717 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1718
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001719Library
1720-------
1721
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001722- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1723
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001724- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1725 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1726 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1727 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1728 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1729 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1730 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1731 or Tester().
1732
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001733- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1734 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1735 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1736 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1737 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1738 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1739 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1740 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1741 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001742
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001743 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001744
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001745- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1746 weren't before was an oversight.
1747
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001748- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1749 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1750
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001751- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1752 when there are no lines.
1753
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001754- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1755 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1756
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001757- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1758 to child processes.
1759
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001760- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1761
1762- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1763
1764- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1765 xmlrpclib.
1766
1767- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1768 responses.
1769
1770- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1771 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1772
1773- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1774 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1775 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1776
1777- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1778 used as patterns.
1779
1780- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1781 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1782 than Tk 8.3.
1783
1784- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1785
1786- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001787
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001788Tools/Demos
1789-----------
1790
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001791- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1792
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001793- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1794
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001795- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001796
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001797Build
1798-----
1799
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001800- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1801
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001802- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1803
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001804- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1805 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001806
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001807- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1808 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1809 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001810
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001811C API
1812-----
1813
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001814- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1815 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1816
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001817Windows
1818-------
1819
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001820- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1821 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1822 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1823 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1824 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1825 Python exception ::
1826
1827 thread.error: can't start new thread
1828
1829 is raised now.
1830
1831- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1832 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1833 instead of from DLL teardown.
1834
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001835Mac
1836---
1837
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001838- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001839 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001840 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1841 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1842 the executable in the bundle.
1843
1844- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001845
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001846- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1847
1848- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1849 on Panther.
1850
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001851What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1852================================
1853
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001854*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001855
1856Core and builtins
1857-----------------
1858
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001859- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1860 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1861 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1862 with the -i option.
1863
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001864- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1865 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1866
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001867- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1868 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1869
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001870- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1871 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1872 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1873 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1874 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1875 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1876 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1877 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1878 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1879 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1880 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1881 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1882 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001883
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001884- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1885 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1886 embedded in a lambda expression.
1887
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001888- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1889 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1890 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1891 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1892 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1893
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001894- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1895 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1896 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1897
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001898- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1899 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1900
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001901- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1902 It's writable again.
1903
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001904- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1905 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1906 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001907 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001908
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001909- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1910 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1911 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1912
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001913Extension modules
1914-----------------
1915
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001916- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1917 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1918
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001919- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1920 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1921 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1922 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1923
1924- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1925 collection.
1926
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001927- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1928 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1929 unique within a single program run.
1930
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001931- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1932 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1933
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001934- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1935 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1936
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001937- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1938 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001939
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001940- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1941
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001942- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1943 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1944
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001945- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1946 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1947 for many BSD-derived systems.
1948
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001949
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001950Library
1951-------
1952
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001953- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1954 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1955 primary ones:
1956
1957 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1958 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1959 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1960
1961 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1962 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1963 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1964 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1965 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1966 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1967
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001968- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1969 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1970 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1971 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1972 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1973 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1974 argument.
1975
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001976- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1977 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1978 in the archive.
1979
1980- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1981 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1982
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001983- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1984 569574).
1985
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001986- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1987 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1988 no more.
1989
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001990- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1991 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1992 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1993 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1994 code coverage.
1995
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001996- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1997 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1998 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001999 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2000 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002001
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002002- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2003 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2004 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002005 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002006
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002007- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2008
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002009- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2010 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2011 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2012 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2013
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002014- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2015 handling.
2016
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002017- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2018 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2019
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002020- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2021 in socket.py.
2022
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002023- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2024
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002025- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2026 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2027 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2028 opener with proxy support.
2029
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002030- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2031
2032- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2033
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002034Tools/Demos
2035-----------
2036
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002037- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2038
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002039- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2040
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002041- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2042 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002043
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002044- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2045 files.
2046
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002047Build
2048-----
2049
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002050- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002051 different root directory.
2052
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002053C API
2054-----
2055
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002056- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2057 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2058 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2059 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2060 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2061 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2062 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2063 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2064 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2065 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2066
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002067- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2068 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2069 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2070 from Python.
2071
2072
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002073New platforms
2074-------------
2075
2076None this time.
2077
2078Tests
2079-----
2080
2081- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2082 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2083
2084Windows
2085-------
2086
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002087- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2088
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002089- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2090 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2091 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2092 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2093 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2094 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2095 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2096 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2097 that's what it's for.
2098
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002099Mac
2100---
2101
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002102- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2103 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2104 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2105 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002106- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2107 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2108- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002109
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002110SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2111------------------------------------
2112
2113430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2114598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2115622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2116661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2117683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2118697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2119713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2120724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2121727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2122729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2123730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2124731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2125732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2126733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2127735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2128740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2129744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2130745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2131747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2132749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2133751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2134753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2135755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2136757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2137760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2138
2139
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002140What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2141================================
2142
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002143*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002144
2145Core and builtins
2146-----------------
2147
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002148- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2149 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2150
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002151- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2152 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2153 and cannot be strings).
2154
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002155- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2156 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2157 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2158 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2159
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002160- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2161 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2162 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2163 Python itself.
2164
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002165- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2166 the referenced object, if it has one.
2167
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002168- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2169 the thread started at
2170 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2171
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002172- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2173 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2174 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2175 placed on a list index.
2176
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002177- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2178 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2179 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2180 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2181
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002182- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2183 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2184 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2185 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2186 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2187 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2188 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2189
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002190- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2191 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2192 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2193 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2194 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2195
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002196- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2197 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002198
2199- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2200 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2201 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2202 #693195.)
2203
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002204- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2205 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002206
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002207- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002208 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002209 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2210 interpreter executions, would fail.
2211
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002212- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002213 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002214 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002215
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002216Extension modules
2217-----------------
2218
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002219- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2220 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2221 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2222 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2223
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002224- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2225 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2226
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002227- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2228 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2229 and Greg Chapman.)
2230
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002231- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2232 recursively.
2233
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002234- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002235 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2236 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2237 leaks.
2238
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002239- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2240
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002241- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2242 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2243 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2244 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2245 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2246 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2247 #705836.
2248
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002249- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002250 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2251
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002252- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2253 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2254 See SF bug #692416.
2255
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002256- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2257 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2258
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002259- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2260 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2261 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002262
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002263- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002264 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2265 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2266
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002267- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2268 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2269 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2270 timeouts to work properly.
2271
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002272Library
2273-------
2274
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002275- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2276 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2277 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2278 future release.
2279
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002280- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2281 for querying platform dependent features.
2282
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002283- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002284
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002285- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2286 pickle protocol versions.
2287
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002288- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2289 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2290 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2291
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002292- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2293
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002294- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2295 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2296 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2297 modules.
2298
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002299- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2300 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2301 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2302
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002303- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2304 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2305
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002306- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2307 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2308 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2309
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002310- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002311 MS Office extensions.
2312
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002313- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2314 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2315
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002316- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2317 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2318
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002319- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2320 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2321 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2322 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2323 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2324 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2325
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002326- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2327 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2328 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002329
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002330- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2331 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2332 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2333
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002334- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2335
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002336- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2337 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2338 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2339
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002340Tools/Demos
2341-----------
2342
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002343- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2344 See the module docstring for details.
2345
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002346Build
2347-----
2348
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002349- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2350 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002351
2352C API
2353-----
2354
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002355- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2356
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002357- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2358 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2359 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2360
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002361- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2362 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002363
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002364 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2365 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2366 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002367
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002368- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002369 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2370
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002371- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2372 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2373 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002374
2375New platforms
2376-------------
2377
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002378None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002379
2380Tests
2381-----
2382
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002383- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2384 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002385
2386Windows
2387-------
2388
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002389- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2390 function.
2391
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002392- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2393 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002394
2395Mac
2396---
2397
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002398- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2399 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002400
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002401- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2402 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002403
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002404- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2405 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2406 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002407
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002408- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002409 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2410 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002411
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002412- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2413 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002414
2415
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002416What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2417=================================
2418
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002419*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002420
2421Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002422-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002423
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002424- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2425 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2426 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2427
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002428- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2429 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2430 (SF patch #664376.)
2431
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002432- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2433 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2434 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2435 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2436 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2437 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002438 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002439
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002440- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2441 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2442 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2443 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002444 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002445
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002446- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2447 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2448 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2449 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2450 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2451 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2452 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2453 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2454 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2455 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2456 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2457
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002458- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2459 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2460 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2461 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2462 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2463 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2464
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002465- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2466 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2467
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002468- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2469 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2470 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2471 case.)
2472
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002473- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2474 passed as unicode strings.
2475
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002476- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2477 See SF bug #683467.
2478
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002479- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2480 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2481
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002482- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2483
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002484- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2485
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002486- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2487 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2488 arguments.
2489
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002490- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2491 See SF bug #667147.
2492
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002493- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002494 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002495 See SF bug #676155.
2496
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002497- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002498 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002499 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2500 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2501 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2502 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2503 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2504 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002505
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002506Extension modules
2507-----------------
2508
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002509- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2510 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2511 tp_as_number pointer.
2512
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002513- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2514 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2515 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2516 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2517 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2518
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002519- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2520
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002521- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2522
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002523- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002524 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002525 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2526 patch #678531.)
2527
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002528- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2529 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2530
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002531- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2532 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2533
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002534- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2535
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002536- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2537 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2538 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2539
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002540- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2541
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002542- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2543 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2544
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002545- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002546
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002547- datetime changes:
2548
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002549 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2550
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002551 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2552 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2553 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2554 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2555 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2556 now.
2557
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002558 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002559 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2560 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002561
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002562 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002563 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002564 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2565 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2566 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2567 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002568
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002569 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2570 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2571 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002572 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2573
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002574 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2575 by a later example coded by Guido.
2576
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002577 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002578 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2579 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2580 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002581 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2582 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2583
2584 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2585 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2586 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2587 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2588 tzinfo subclass instance.
2589
2590 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2591 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2592 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2593 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2594 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2595 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2596 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2597 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002598
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002599 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2600 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2601 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2602 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2603 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002604 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2605
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002606 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002607
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002608 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2609 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2610 as a naive datetime object.
2611
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002612 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2613 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2614 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2615
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002616 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2617 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2618 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2619 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2620 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2621 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2622 comparison.
2623
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002624 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2625 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2626 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2627 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002628 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002629
2630 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002631
2632 and ::
2633
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002634 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2635
2636 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2637 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2638 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2639 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2640
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002641 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2642 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2643 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2644 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2645 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2646
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002647 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2648 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002649 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2650 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002651
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002652Library
2653-------
2654
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002655- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2656 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2657
2658- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2659 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2660 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2661 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2662 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2663 See PEP 307 for details.
2664
2665- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2666 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2667
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002668- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2669 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002670 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002671 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2672 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002673 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002674
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002675- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2676 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2677
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002678- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2679 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2680 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2681
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002682- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2683
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002684- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2685 exception.
2686
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002687- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2688 class.
2689
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002690- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2691 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2692 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2693
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002694- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2695 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2696
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002697- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002698 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2699 See SF bug #659228.
2700
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002701- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2702 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2703 See SF patch #651082.
2704
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002705- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002706
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002707- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2708 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2709
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002710- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002711 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002712
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002713- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2714 DOS paths from other platforms.
2715
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002716Tools/Demos
2717-----------
2718
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002719- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2720 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2721 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2722 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2723 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2724 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2725 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2726 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2727 example:
2728
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002729 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2730 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002731
2732 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2733
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002734
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002735Build
2736-----
2737
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002738- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2739 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2740 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002741 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2742
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002743 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2744
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002745- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2746 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2747 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2748 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2749 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2750 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2751 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2752 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2753 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2754
2755- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2756 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2757 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2758 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2759
2760- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2761 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2762
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002763C API
2764-----
2765
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002766- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2767 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002768
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002769- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2770 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2771 tp_as_number pointer.
2772
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002773- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2774 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2775 (SF #681367)
2776
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002777- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2778 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2779 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2780 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002781
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002782Tests
2783-----
2784
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002785- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002786 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2787 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2788 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2789 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2790 pydoc.)
2791
2792- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2793
2794- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002795
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002796Windows
2797-------
2798
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002799- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2800 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2801 time).
2802
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002803- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2804 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2805
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002806- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2807 release without strong cryptography.
2808
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002809- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002810 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002811
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002812- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2813 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2814
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002815Mac
2816---
2817
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002818- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2819 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002820
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002821- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2822 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2823 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002824
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002825- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2826 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002827
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002828- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2829 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2830 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2831 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002832
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002833- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002834 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2835 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2836 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002837
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002838
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002839What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002840=================================
2841
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002842*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002843
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002844Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002845--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002846
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002847- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2848
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002849- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2850 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002851 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002852 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002853 a different meaning than before.
2854
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002855- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002856 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002857 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002858
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002859- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002860 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002861 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002862
2863- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2864 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2865 and deallocation.
2866
2867- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2868 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2869
2870- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2871 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2872 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2873 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2874 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2875
2876- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2877 now detected by the garbage collector.
2878
2879- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2880 [SF bug 519621]
2881
2882- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2883 identifier.
2884
2885- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2886 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2887 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2888 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2889 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2890 [SF bug 563060]
2891
2892- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2893 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2894 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2895 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2896 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2897
2898- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2899 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2900 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2901
2902- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2903
2904- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2905 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2906 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2907 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2908 state of the slots would be lost.)
2909
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002910Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002911-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002912
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002913- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002914 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2915 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2916 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2917 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002918 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2919 Jython 2.1.
2920
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002921- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002922 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002923 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2924 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2925 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2926 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2927 these, see PEP 302.
2928
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002929- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2930 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2931 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2932
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002933- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2934 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2935 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2936
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002937- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2938 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2939 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2940
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002941- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2942 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2943 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2944 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2945 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2946 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2947 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2948 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2949 releases or implementations.
2950
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002951- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002952 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2953 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002954
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002955- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2956 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2957
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002958- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2959 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2960 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2961
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002962- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2963 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2964
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002965- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2966 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002967 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2968 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002969
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002970- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2971 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2972 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2973 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2974 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2975
2976 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2977 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2978 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2979 pattern.
2980
2981 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2982 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2983 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2984 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2985
2986 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2987 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2988 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2989 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2990 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2991 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2992
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002993- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2994 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2995 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2996 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2997 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2998 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2999 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3000 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003001
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003002- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3003 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3004 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3005 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3006 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003007 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3008 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3009 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3010 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3011 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3012 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3013 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003014
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003015- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3016 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3017
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003018- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3019 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3020 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3021 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3022 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3023 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3024 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3025 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3026 to Zack Weinberg!
3027
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003028- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3029 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3030 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3031 type. This has been fixed now.
3032
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003033- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3034 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3035 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3036
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003037- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3038 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3039 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3040 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3041 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3042 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3043 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3044 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003045 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003046
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003047- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3048 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3049 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003050
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003051- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3052 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3053 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3054 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3055 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3056 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3057 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3058 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003059 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003060 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3061 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3062
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003063- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3064 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3065 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3066 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3067 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3068 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3069 this.)
3070
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003071- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3072 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003073 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003074 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003075 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3076 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003077 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3078 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003079
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003080- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3081 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3082 currently running.
3083
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003084- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3085 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3086 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3087 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3088
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003089- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3090 as directory names.
3091
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003092- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3093 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3094
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003095- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3096 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3097
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003098- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003099 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3100 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003101
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003102- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3103 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3104 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3105 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3106 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3107
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003108- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3109 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3110 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3111 removed.
3112
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003113- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3114 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3115 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3116
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003117- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3118 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3119 to __debug__.
3120
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003121- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3122 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3123 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3124
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003125- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3126 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3127 deprecated now.
3128
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003129- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3130 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3131 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003132
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003133- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3134 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3135 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3136 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3137 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003138
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003139- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3140 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3141
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003142- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3143 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3144 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003145 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003146 is backward compatible.
3147
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003148- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3149 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3150 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3151 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3152 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3153
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003154- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3155 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3156 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3157 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3158 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3159 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003160
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003161- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3162 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3163
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003164- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3165 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3166
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003167- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3168 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3169 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3170 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3171 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3172
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003173- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3174 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3175 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3176
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003177- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003178 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3179
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003180- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3181 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3182 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003183
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003184- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3185 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3186
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003187- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3188 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3189 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3190
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003191- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3192
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003193Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003194-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003195
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003196- Added three operators to the operator module:
3197 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3198 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3199 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3200
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003201- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3202
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003203- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3204 archives.
3205
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003206- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3207 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3208 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3209
3210 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3211
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003212- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3213 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3214 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003215 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003216
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003217- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3218 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3219 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3220 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003221 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3222 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3223 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3224 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003225
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003226- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3227 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003228
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003229- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3230
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003231- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3232 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3233
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003234- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3235 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3236 supported.
3237
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003238- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3239
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003240- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3241 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003242
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003243- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3244 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3245
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003246- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3247
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003248- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3249 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3250
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003251- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3252 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3253 functions but callable type objects.
3254
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003255- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003256 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003257 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003258
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003259- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3260 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003261
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003262- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3263 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003264
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003265- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3266 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3267 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3268 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3269
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003270- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3271 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003272
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003273- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3274 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3275 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3276 and __imul__.
3277
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003278- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003279 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3280 is called.
3281
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003282- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3283 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3284 interpreter was compiled.
3285
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003286- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3287 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3288 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003289 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003290 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3291 1, not 2.
3292
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003293- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3294 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3295 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3296 limit.
3297
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003298- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3299 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3300 bug #623464.
3301
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003302- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3303 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3304 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3305 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3306
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003307Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003308-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003309
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003310- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3311
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003312- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3313 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3314 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3315 with Python 2.3a2.
3316
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003317- os.path exposes getctime.
3318
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003319- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003320 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003321 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003322 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003323 unit tests of floating point results.
3324
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003325- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3326 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3327 has been increased.
3328
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003329- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3330 executed.
3331
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003332- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3333 postinstallation script.
3334
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003335- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3336 test the current module.
3337
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003338- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003339 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3340 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3341 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3342 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3343
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003344- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003345 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003346 Ward's Optik package.
3347
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003348- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3349 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3350 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3351 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3352
3353- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3354 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003355 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003356
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003357- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3358 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3359 shelf are binary pickles.
3360
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003361- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3362 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3363
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003364- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3365 modules are iterators now.
3366
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003367- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3368 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3369 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3370 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3371 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3372 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003373
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003374- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3375 with their entity value.
3376
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003377- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3378
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003379- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3380 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003381
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003382- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3383 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003384 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003385
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003386- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3387 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3388 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3389 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3390 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3391 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3392 main():
3393
3394 import locale
3395 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3396
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003397- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3398 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3399
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003400- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3401 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3402 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3403 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3404 to the new standard.
3405
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003406- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3407 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3408 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3409 an extension to the database.
3410
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003411- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3412 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3413 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3414 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003415 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003416
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003417- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003418 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003419
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003420- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3421 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3422 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3423 bounded integers.
3424
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003425- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3426 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3427 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3428 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3429 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3430 in existence.
3431
3432 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3433 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3434 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3435 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3436 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3437 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3438
3439 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3440 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3441 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3442 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3443
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003444- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3445 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3446 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3447
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003448- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3449
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003450- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3451 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3452 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3453 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3454
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003455- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3456 argument.
3457
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003458- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3459 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3460 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3461 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3462 [SF patch 560794].
3463
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003464- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3465 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3466 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003467 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3468 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3469 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003470
3471- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3472 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003473
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003474- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3475 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3476 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3477 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003478
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003479- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3480 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3481 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3482 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3483 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3484
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003485- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003486
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003487- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3488
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003489- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3490 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3491 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3492 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3493 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3494 identical to None.
3495
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003496- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3497 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3498 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3499 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3500 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3501 results now.
3502
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003503- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3504 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3505
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003506- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3507 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3508 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3509 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3510 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3511 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3512 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3513 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3514
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003515- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3516
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003517- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3518 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3519
3520- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3521 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3522 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3523 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3524 and other systems.
3525
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003526- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3527 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3528 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3529 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 +00003530 work well with these.
3531
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003532- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3533
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003534- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003535 connections.
3536
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003537- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3538 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3539 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3540
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003541- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3542 sets
3543
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003544- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3545 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3546 name.
3547
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003548- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3549 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3550 passed in.
3551
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003552- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003553 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003554 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3555 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003556
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003557- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3558
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003559- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3560
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003561- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3562 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3563 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3564
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003565- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3566 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3567 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3568 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003569 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003570
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003571- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003572 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003573 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003574
3575- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3576 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3577 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3578
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003579- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003580 the value of its expression argument.
3581
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003582- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3583 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3584 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3585
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003586- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3587 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3588 skipstone browser was included.
3589
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003590- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3591 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3592
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003593Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003594-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003595
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003596- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3597 names in addition to accepting file names.
3598
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003599- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3600 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3601 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3602 still used and useful.)
3603
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003604- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3605 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3606 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3607 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003608
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003609- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3610 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3611 the generated binary.
3612
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003613Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003614-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003615
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003616- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3617
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003618- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3619 except in the hands of experts.
3620
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003621- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003622 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3623 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3624 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003625
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003626- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3627 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3628 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3629 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3630 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3631 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3632 builds.
3633
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003634- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3635 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3636 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3637 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3638 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3639 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3640 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3641 new type.
3642
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003643- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003644
3645 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3646 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3647 positive infinities.
3648
3649 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3650 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3651 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3652 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3653 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3654 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3655 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3656
3657 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3658
3659 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3660
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003661- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3662 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3663 size of the executable.
3664
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003665- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3666 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3667 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3668 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003669
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003670- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3671
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003672- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3673 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3674 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003675
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003676- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3677 well as Unix.
3678
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003679- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3680 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3681 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3682 modules in the README file for details.
3683
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003684C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003685-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003686
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003687- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3688 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003689 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003690 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003691 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003692
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003693- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3694 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3695 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3696 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3697 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3698 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003699 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003700 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3701 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3702 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3703 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3704 aligned.)
3705
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003706- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3707 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3708 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3709
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003710- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3711 level.
3712
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003713- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3714 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3715 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3716 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3717 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3718
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003719- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3720 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3721 code.
3722
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003723- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3724 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3725 adjusting for negative indices.
3726
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003727- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3728 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3729 object.
3730
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003731- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3732 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3733 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3734
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003735- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3736 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003737
3738- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3739
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003740- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3741 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3742 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3743 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3744
3745- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3746
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003747- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003748
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003749- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003750 without going through the buffer API.
3751
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003752- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003753
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003754- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3755 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3756 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3757 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3758
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003759- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3760 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3761
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003762- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003763 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3764
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003765New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003766-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003767
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003768- OpenVMS is now supported.
3769
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003770- AtheOS is now supported.
3771
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003772- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3773
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003774- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3775
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003776Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003777-----
3778
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003779- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3780 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3781 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003782
3783Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003784-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003785
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003786- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3787 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3788 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3789 bugs.
3790 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003791 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003792 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3793 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003794 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003795
3796- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003797 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003798
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003799- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3800 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3801
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003802- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3803 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003804 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003805 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3806
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003807- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3808 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3809 use files" uninstall option).
3810
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003811- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3812
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003813- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3814 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3815
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003816- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3817 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3818 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3819
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003820- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3821 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3822 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3823 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3824 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003825 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3826 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3827 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003828
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003829- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003830 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003831 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3832 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3833 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3834 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3835 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3836 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3837 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3838 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3839 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3840 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3841 work around.
3842
3843- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3844 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3845 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3846 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3847 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3848 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3849 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3850 specified with O_CREAT too).
3851
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003852Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003853----
3854
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003855- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003856
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003857- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3858 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3859 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3860
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003861- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3862 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3863 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3864
3865- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3866 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3867 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3868 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3869 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3870 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3871 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3872 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003873
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003874- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3875 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3876 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003877
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003878- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3879 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3880 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3881 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3882 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003883
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003884- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3885 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3886 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003887
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003888- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3889 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003890
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003891- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3892 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3893 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3894 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3895 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003896
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003897- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3898 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3899 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3900
3901- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3902 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3903 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003904
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003905- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3906 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3907 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3908 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003909 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003910
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003911- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3912 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003913
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003914- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3915 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003916
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003917- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003918 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003919 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3920 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003921
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003922
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003923What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003924===============================
3925
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003926*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3927
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003928Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003929--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003930
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003931- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3932 with a custom metaclass.
3933
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003934Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003935-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003936
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003937- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3938 are proxies.
3939
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003940Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003941-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003942
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003943- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3944 very short strings.
3945
3946- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3947 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3948 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3949 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3950 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3951
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003952Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003953-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003954
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003955- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3956 close or delete time).
3957
3958- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3959 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3960
3961- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3962
3963- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003964 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003965
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003966Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003967-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003968
3969Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003970-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003971
3972C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003973-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003974
3975New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003976-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003977
3978Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003979-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003980
3981Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003982-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003983
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003984- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3985
3986- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3987 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3988
3989- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3990 deleted at process exit time.
3991
3992- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3993 in backslash.
3994
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003995Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003996----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003997
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003998- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3999 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4000 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4001
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004002
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004003What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004004===========================
4005
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004006*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4007
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004008Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004009--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004010
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004011- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4012 been extensively updated. See
4013
4014 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4015
4016 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4017
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004018- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4019 deleted!
4020
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004021- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4022 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4023 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4024 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4025 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4026
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004027- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4028
4029 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4030 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4031
4032 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4033 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4034 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4035 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4036 supported anyway.
4037
4038 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4039 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4040
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004041- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4042 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4043 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4044 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4045 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004046
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004047- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4048 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4049 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4050
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004051Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004052-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004053
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004054- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4055 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4056 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4057 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4058 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4059 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004060 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4061 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4062 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4063 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004064
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004065- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4066 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4067 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4068
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004069Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004070-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004071
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004072- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4073
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004074Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004075-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004076
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004077- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4078 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4079 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4080 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4081 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4082 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4083
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004084- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4085
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004086- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4087
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004088- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4089
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004090- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4091 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4092 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4093
4094- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4095
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004096Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004097-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004098
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004099- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4100 off a search on Google.
4101
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004102Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004103-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004104
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004105- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4106 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4107 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4108 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4109 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4110 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4111 other platforms should do likewise.
4112
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004113- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4114 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4115 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4116
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004117C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004118-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004119
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004120- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4121 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4122 producing key-value pairs.
4123
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004124- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004125 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004126 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4127 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4128 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4129 previously went unchallenged.
4130
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004131New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004132-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004133
4134Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004135-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004136
4137Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004138-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004139
4140Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004141----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004142
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004143- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4144 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004145
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004146- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4147 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4148 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4149 home.
4150
4151
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004152What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004153===========================
4154
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004155*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4156
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004157Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004158--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004159
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004160- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4161 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004162
4163 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004164 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004165
4166 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4167 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004168 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004169 This needs to be documented.
4170
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004171- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4172 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4173
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004174- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4175 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4176 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4177
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004178- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4179 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4180
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004181- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4182 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4183 class forbids it).
4184
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004185- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4186 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4187 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4188
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004189- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4190
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004191Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004192-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004193
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004194- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4195 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004196 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004197
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004198- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4199 (like 1 + '').
4200
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004201Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004202-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004203
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004204- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4205 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4206 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4207 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004208 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004209 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4210
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004211- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4212 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4213 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4214 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4215
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004216- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4217 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004218 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4219 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4220 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004221
4222- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4223 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004224
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004225- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4226 bytes on its input.
4227
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004228Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004229-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004230
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004231- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004232 convenience function.
4233
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004234- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4235 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4236 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004237 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4238 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4239 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4240 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4241 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4242 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004243
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004244- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4245 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4246 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4247 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4248
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004249- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4250 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4251 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4252
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004253- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4254 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4255 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4256 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4257
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004258- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4259 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004260 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004261 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4262 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4263 new -l and -e options.
4264
4265- statcache is now deprecated.
4266
4267- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4268 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004269 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004270 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4271 time properly taken into account.
4272
4273- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4274 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4275 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4276 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4277
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004278Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004279-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004280
4281Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004282-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004283
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004284- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4285 is built with libdb3 if available.
4286
4287- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4288
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004289C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004290-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004291
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004292- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4293 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4294 PySequence_Size().
4295
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004296- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4297
4298- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4299 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4300 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4301
4302- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4303 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4304
4305- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4306 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4307
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004308New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004309-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004310
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004311- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4312 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4313
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004314- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4315 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4316
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004317- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4318
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004319Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004320-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004321
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004322- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4323 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4324
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004325Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004326-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004327
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004328Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004329----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004330
4331- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4332 removed completely in the next release.
4333
4334- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4335 OSX.
4336
4337- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4338 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4339
4340- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4341
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004342
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004343What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004344===========================
4345
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004346*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4347
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004348Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004349--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004350
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004351- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004352 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004353 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004354 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4355 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004356 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4357 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004358 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4359 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004360
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004361- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4362 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4363
4364- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4365 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4366
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004367Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004368-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004369
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004370- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4371 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4372 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4373 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4374 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4375 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4376 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4377 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4378
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004379- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4380 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4381 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4382 example).
4383
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004384- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004385 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004386 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004387 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004388
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004389- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4390 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4391 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004392 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004393
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004394- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4395 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4396 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4397 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4398 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4399 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4400
4401 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4402
4403 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4404
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004405Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004406-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004407
4408- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4409
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004410- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4411
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004412- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4413 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004414
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004415- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4416 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4417 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4418 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4419 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4420 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004421 attributes.
4422
4423- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4424 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4425 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004426
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004427- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4428 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4429 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004430
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004431- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4432 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4433 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004434 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4435 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4436
4437- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4438 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004439
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004440Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004441-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004442
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004443- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4444 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4445
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004446- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4447 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4448 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4449 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4450
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004451- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4452 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4453 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4454 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4455
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004456 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4457 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4458 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4459 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4460 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4461 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4462 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4463 without losing information).
4464
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004465- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004466 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4467 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4468 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4469 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4470 module).
4471
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004472 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004473 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4474 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4475 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4476 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004477
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004478- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004479 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4480 encoding.
4481
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004482- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4483 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4484
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004485- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004486 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4487
4488- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4489 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4490 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4491 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4492
4493- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4494
4495- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4496 ON, and OFF.
4497
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004498- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4499 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4500
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004501Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004502-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004503
4504- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4505 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4506 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004507
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004508- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4509 been added: -X and -E.
4510
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004511Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004512-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004513
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004514- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4515 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4516
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004517C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004518-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004519
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004520- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4521 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4522 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4523 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4524 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4525
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004526- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4527 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4528 as long) arguments.
4529
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004530- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4531 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4532 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4533 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4534 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4535 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4536
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004537- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4538 input.
4539
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004540New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004541-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004542
4543Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004544-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004545
4546Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004547-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004548
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004549- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4550 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4551 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4552
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004553- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4554 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4555 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004556 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004557
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004558 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4559 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4560 import signal
4561 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004562
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004563 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004564 while 1:
4565 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004566 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004567 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4568 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4569 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4570 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004571
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004572
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004573What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4574===========================
4575
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004576*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4577
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004578Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004579--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004580
4581- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4582 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4583 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4584
4585- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4586 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4587 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4588 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4589 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4590 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4591 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004592
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004593- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004594 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004595 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4596 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4597 associate a docstring with a property.
4598
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004599- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4600 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4601 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4602 other built-in object types.
4603
4604- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4605 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4606 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4607 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4608 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4609
4610- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4611 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4612
4613- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4614 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004615 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004616 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4617 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4618 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4619 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4620 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4621
4622- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4623 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4624 class.
4625
4626- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4627 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4628 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4629 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4630
4631- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4632 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4633 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4634 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4635
4636- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4637 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4638
4639- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4640 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4641 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4642 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4643 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004644 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004645 with the same value as s.
4646
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004647- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4648
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004649Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004650----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004651
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004652- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4653
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004654- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4655 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4656 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4657 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4658 objects.
4659
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004660- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4661 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004662 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4663 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4664
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004665- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4666 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4667 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4668
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004669Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004670-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004671
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004672- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4673 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4674 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4675 by the instances.
4676
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004677- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4678 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4679 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4680
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004681- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4682 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4683 before the entire comparison is complete.
4684
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004685- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4686 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4687 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4688
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004689- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4690 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4691 getwriter().
4692
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004693- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4694 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4695
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004696- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004697 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4698 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4699
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004700- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4701 iterable object.
4702
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004703- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4704 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004705
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004706- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4707 authentication.
4708
4709- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4710 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004711
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004712- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004713 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4714 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4715 a sample driver.)
4716
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004717Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004718-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004719
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004720- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4721 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4722 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4723 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4724 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4725 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4726 kernel has large file support.
4727
4728- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4729 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4730 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4731 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4732 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4733
4734- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4735 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4736 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4737
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004738C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004739-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004740
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004741- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4742 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4743
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004744New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004745-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004746
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004747- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4748 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4749
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004750Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004751-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004752
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004753- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4754 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4755 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4756 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4757 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4758
4759- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4760 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4761 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4762 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4763
4764- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4765 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4766
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004767Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004768-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004769
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004770- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004771 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4772 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004773
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004774
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004775What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4776===========================
4777
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004778*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4779
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004780Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004781----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004782
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004783- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4784 big to represent as a C double.
4785
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004786- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4787 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4788 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4789 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4790 restriction).
4791
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004792- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4793 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4794 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4795 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4796 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4797
4798 >>> dir([])
4799 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4800 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4801 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4802 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4803 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4804 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4805 'reverse', 'sort']
4806
4807 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4808
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004809- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004810 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4811 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4812 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4813 OverflowError exception.
4814
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004815- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004816 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004817 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4818 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4819 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4820 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4821 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004822 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004823 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4824 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4825
4826 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4827 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4828 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4829 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004830
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004831- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004832 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4833 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4834 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4835 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4836 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4837 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4838 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4839 once it is created.
4840
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004841- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4842 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4843 (key, value) pairs.
4844
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004845- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004846 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4847 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4848
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004849- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4850 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4851 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4852 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4853 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004854
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004855- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004856 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4857 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4858
4859 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4860
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004861- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004862 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4863
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004864Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004865-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004866
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004867- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004868 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4869 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004870
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004871- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4872 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4873 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4874 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4875 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4876 in this area anymore).
4877
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004878- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4879 threading.Timer.
4880
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004881- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4882 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4883
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004884- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004885 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4886
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004887- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004888 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4889 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4890 converted to Python longs.
4891
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004892- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004893 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4894
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004895- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4896 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4897 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4898
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004899Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004900-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004901
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004902- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4903 division operators as per PEP 238.
4904
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004905Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004906-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004907
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004908- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4909 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4910 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4911 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4912
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004913C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004914-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004915
4916- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004917
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004918- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4919 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004920 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004921
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004922 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4923 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004924 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004925 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004926
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004927- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004928 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4929 module:
4930
4931 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004932
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004933 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4934 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004935
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004936 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4937 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004938
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004939 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4940
4941 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4942
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004943- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004944 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4945 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4946 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004947
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004948New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004949-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004950
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004951- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4952 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4953 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4954 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4955 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004956
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004957Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004958-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004959
4960Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004961-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004962
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004963- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4964 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4965 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4966 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004967 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4968 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4969 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4970 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4971 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004972
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004973- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004974 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4975
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004976
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004977What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4978===========================
4979
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004980*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4981
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004982Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004983-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004984
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004985- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4986 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4987
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004988- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4989 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4990 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004991
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004992- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4993 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4994 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4995 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004996
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004997- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4998
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004999- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005000
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005001Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005002-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005003
5004- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005005 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005006 the module docstring for details.
5007
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005008Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005009-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005010
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005011- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005012 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5013 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5014 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005015
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005016- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5017 Nick Mathewson.
5018
5019Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005020----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005021
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005022- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5023 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5024 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5025 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5026 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5027 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5028 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5029 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5030
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005031- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5032 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5033 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5034 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5035
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005036- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5037 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5038 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5039 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5040 come a long way).
5041
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005042- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5043 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5044 write filters for these warnings).
5045
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005046- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5047 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5048 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5049 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5050 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5051
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005052- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5053 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5054 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5055 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5056 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5057 older distribution.
5058
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005059Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005060-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005061
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005062- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5063 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005064 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005065
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005066- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5067 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5068 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5069
5070- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5071
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005072- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5073
5074- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5075
5076- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5077
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005078- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005079
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005080- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5081
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005082New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005083-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005084
5085C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005086-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005087
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005088- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5089 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5090 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5091 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5092 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5093 against buffer overruns.
5094
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005095- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005096 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5097 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005098 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5099 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5100 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5101
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005102- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5103 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5104 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5105 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5106 deprecated.
5107
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005108Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005109-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005110
5111- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5112 relevant is found.
5113
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005114
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005115What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005116===========================
5117
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005118*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5119
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005120Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005121----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005122
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005123- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5124 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5125 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5126 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5127 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5128 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5129 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5130 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005131 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005132 repaired.
5133
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005134- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005135 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005136 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5137 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5138 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5139 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5140 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5141 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5142 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5143 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5144
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005145- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5146 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5147 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5148 leading BMO character).
5149
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005150- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5151 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5152 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5153
5154 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5155 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5156 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005157
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005158 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5159 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5160 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5161 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5162 for various simple to use conversions.
5163
5164 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5165 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5166
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005167 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5168 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5169 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5170 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5171 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5172 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5173 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5174 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5175 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5176 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5177 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5178 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5179 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5180 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5181 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005182
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005183- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5184 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5185 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005186 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005187 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005188
5189 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005190 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5191 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5192 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5193 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5194 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005195 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5196 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005197
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005198 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5199 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5200 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005201 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005202
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005203- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5204 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5205 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5206 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5207 floating arithmetic,
5208
5209 x = 9007199254740992.0
5210 print long(x)
5211
5212 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5213 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5214 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5215 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5216 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5217 functions are of good quality).
5218
5219 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5220 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5221 algorithms to break.
5222
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005223- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5224 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5225 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5226 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5227 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5228 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5229 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5230 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5231 order.
5232
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005233- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5234 operation along the most common code paths.
5235
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005236- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5237 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5238
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005239- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5240 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5241 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5242 {}.update(UserDict())
5243
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005244- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5245 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5246 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5247 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5248 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5249 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5250 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5251 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5252
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005253- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005254 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005255
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005256 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005257 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5258 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005259 join() method of strings
5260 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005261 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5262 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005263 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005264 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005265
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005266- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5267 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5268
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005269- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5270 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5271
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005272- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5273 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5274 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5275 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5276
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005277- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5278 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005279 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005280 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5281 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005282
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005283- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5284
5285
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005286Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005287-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005288
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005289- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005290 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005291 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5292 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5293
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005294- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5295 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5296
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005297- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5298 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5299 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5300 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5301
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005302- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5303 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5304 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5305
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005306- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5307
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005308- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5309
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005310- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5311 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5312 that are still imported into string.py).
5313
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005314- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5315
5316- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5317 Now it does.
5318
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005319- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5320
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005321- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5322 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5323 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5324 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5325 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005326 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5327 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005328
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005329- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5330 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5331 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5332 'help(object)'.
5333
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005334Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005335-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005336
5337- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005338 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005339 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5340 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5341
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005342- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005343 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5344 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005345
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005346C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005347-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005348
5349- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5350 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005351
5352----
5353
5354**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**