blob: fab6163a58a8977f798e93b1994386aa76a1f8ee [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000015- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
16
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000017- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
18 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
19
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000020- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
21 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
22 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
23
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000024- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
25
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000026- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
27 reference counts in some error exit cases.
28
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000029- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
30 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
31 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
32 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
33 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
34 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
35 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
36 realloc.
37
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000038- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
39 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
40
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000041- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
42 like their int counterparts.
43
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000044- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
45 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
46 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
47 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
48 for a longer write-up of the problem).
49
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000050- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
51 serializing floats.
52
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000053- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
54 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
55 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
56
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000057- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
58 278.
59
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000060- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
61 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
62 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
63 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
64 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
65 PyNumber_*().
66 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
67
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000068- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
69 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
70 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
71 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
72
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000073- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
74 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
75 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
76 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
77 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
78
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000079- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
80 disabled caused a crash.
81
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000082- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
83 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
84
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000085- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000086 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
87
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000088- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
89
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000090- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000091 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
92 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
93 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000094
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000095- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
96
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000097- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
98 returning None.
99
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000100- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000101 ('\') with a specific error message.
102
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000103- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
104
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000105- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
106 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
107
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000108- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000109 an ferror() call.
110
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000111- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
112 list.sort().
113
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000114- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
115 (2+3) --> (5).
116
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000117- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
118
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000119- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
120 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000121
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000122- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
123 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
124 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
125
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000126- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
127 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
128 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
129
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000130Extension Modules
131-----------------
132
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000133- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
134 on Windows.
135
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000136- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
137 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
138
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000139- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
140 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
141 for large or negative values.
142
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000143- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000144 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000145
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000146- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
147
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000148- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
149 if available on the platform.
150
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000151- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
152 available on the platform.
153
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000154- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
155 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
156
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000157- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
158
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000159- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
160 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
161 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
162
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000163- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
164
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000165- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
166 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
167
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000168- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000169 file size.
170
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000171- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
172
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000173- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
174 {remove_history,replace_history}
175
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000176- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
177 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000178
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000179- stat_float_times is now True.
180
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000181- array.array objects are now picklable.
182
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000183- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
184 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
185
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000186- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
187 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
188 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
189
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000190- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
191 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000192
193Library
194-------
195
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000196- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
197 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
198 match the Content-Length header.
199
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000200- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
201
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000202- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
203 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
204 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
205
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000206- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
207
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000208- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
209
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000210- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
211 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
212
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000213- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
214 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
215 Tkdnd.
216
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000217- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
218 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
219
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000220- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
221 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
222
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000223- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000224 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
225
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000226- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
227 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
228
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000229- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
230 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
231
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000232- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000233 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000234
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000235- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
236
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000237- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
238 error messages.
239
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000240- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
241
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000242- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
243 Bug #1224621.
244
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000245- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
246 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
247 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
248 terminates by raising StopIteration.
249
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000250- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
251
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000252- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
253 component of the path.
254
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000255- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
256 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
257 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
258 class at all.
259
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000260- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
261 files to PyPI.
262
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000263- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
264 them to PyPI.
265
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000266- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
267 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
268 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
269 work as expected.
270
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000271- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
272 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
273
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000274- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000275 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
276
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000277- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
278
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000279- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
280 to build.
281
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000282- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
283 symbolic links on Windows.
284
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000285- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000286 profile.py if available.
287
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000288- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
289
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000290- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
291 in LWPCookieJar.
292
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000293- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
294
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000295- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
296
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000297- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
298
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000299- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
300
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000301- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
302
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000303- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
304
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000305- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
306
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000307- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
308
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000309- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
310 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
311 be exploited in various ways.
312
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000313- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
314
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000315- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
316
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000317- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
318
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000319- Enhancements to the csv module:
320
321 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000322 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000323 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000324 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
325 reporting.
326 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
327 dictates.
328 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000329 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000330 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000331 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
332 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000333 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
334 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000335 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000336 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
337 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
338 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
339 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
340 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
341 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
342 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
343 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
344 without first creating a dialect class.
345 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
346 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
347 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000348 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000349 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
350 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000351 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
352 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
353 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
354 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000355 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
356 This has been fixed.
357
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000358- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
359 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
360 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
361 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
362
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000363- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
364
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000365- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
366 (Bug #951915).
367
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000368- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
369 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
370 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000371 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000372
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000373- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
374
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000375- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
376 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
377
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000378- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
379
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000380- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
381
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000382- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
383
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000384- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
385
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000386- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
387
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000388- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
389 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
390 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
391
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000392- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000393 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000394
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000395- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
396 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
397 tokenizer with very long source lines.
398
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000399- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
400 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
401
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000402- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
403 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000404
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000405- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
406 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
407
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000408- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
409 correctly.
410
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000411- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
412 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
413 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
414 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
415 between two lines.
416
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000417
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000418Build
419-----
420
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000421- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
422 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
423
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000424- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
425 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
426
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000427- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
428 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
429 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000430 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000431
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000432- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
433 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
434 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
435
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000436- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
437
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000438- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
439 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
440
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000441- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
442 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
443 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
444 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
445 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
446 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
447 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
448 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
449
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000450- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
451 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
452 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
453 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
454
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000455
456C API
457-----
458
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000459- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
460
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000461- Removed PyRange_New().
462
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000463
464Tests
465-----
466
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000467- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000468
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000469
470Documentation
471-------------
472
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000473- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
474
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000475- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
476
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000477- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
478
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000479- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
480
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000481- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
482
483- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
484
485- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
486
487- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
488
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000489- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
490 Closes bug #1166582.
491
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000492- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
493 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
494 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
495
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000496Mac
497---
498
499
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000500New platforms
501-------------
502
503- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
504
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000505
506Tools/Demos
507-----------
508
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000509- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
510 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
511 source files that need an encoding declaration.
512 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
513
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000514- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
515
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000516- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000517
518
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000519What's New in Python 2.4 final?
520===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000521
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000522*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000523
524Core and builtins
525-----------------
526
527- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
528 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
529 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
530
531
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000532What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
533==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000534
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000535*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000536
537Core and builtins
538-----------------
539
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000540- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
541 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
542 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
543
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000544
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000545Library
546-------
547
548- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
549 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
550 raised is re-raised.
551
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000552- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
553 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
554
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000555- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
556 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
557 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
558 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
559 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
560 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
561 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
562 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
563 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
564 by the slice are recomputed now.
565
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000566- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000567
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000568Build
569-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000570
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000571- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
572 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
573 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000574
575C API
576-----
577
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000578- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
579
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000580
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000581What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
582================================
583
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000584*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000585
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000586License
587-------
588
589The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
590is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
591changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
592Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
593intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
594durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
595the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
596License::
597
598 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
599
600says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
601to Python 2.1.1.
602
603The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
604License Version 2.
605
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000606Core and builtins
607-----------------
608
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000609- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
610 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
611 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
612 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
613 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
614 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
615 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
616 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
617 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
618 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
619
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000620- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000621
622Extension Modules
623-----------------
624
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000625- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
626 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
627 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
628 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000629
630Library
631-------
632
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000633- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
634 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
635 returned.
636
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000637- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
638
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000639- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
640 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
641
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000642- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
643
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000644- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
645 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000646
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000647- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
648
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000649- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
650
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000651- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000652 the source code is updated and reloaded.
653
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000654Build
655-----
656
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000657- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000658
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000659What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
660================================
661
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000662*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000663
664Core and builtins
665-----------------
666
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000667- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000668 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
669
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000670- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
671 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
672 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
673 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
674
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000675- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
676 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
677
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000678- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
679 constant.
680
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000681- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
682 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
683 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
684 large), and to anomalies such as
685 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
686 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
687 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
688 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000689
690Extension modules
691-----------------
692
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000693- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
694 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000695 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
696 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
697 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000698
699Library
700-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000701
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000702- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000703 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000704 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
705 --swig-cpp.
706
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000707- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
708 it is set.
709
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000710- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000711
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000712- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
713 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
714 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
715 Closes bug #1039270.
716
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000717- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000718
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000719 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000720 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
721 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
722 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
723 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
724 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
725 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
726 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
727 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
728 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
729 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
730 + Updates to documentation.
731
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000732- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
733 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
734 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
735 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
736
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000737- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000738
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000739- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
740 applications should use the getmember function.
741
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000742- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
743
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000744- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
745 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
746 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
747 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
748 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
749 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
750 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
751 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
752 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
753
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000754- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
755 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000756 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000757
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000758- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
759 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
760 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
761 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
762 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
763 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
764 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
765 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000766
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000767- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
768 the new public features (of which there are many).
769
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000770- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000771 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
772 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
773 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
774 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000775 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000776
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000777- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
778
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000779- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
780 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
781 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
782 options.
783
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000784- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
785 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
786 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
787 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
788 conditions under which non-string values work.
789
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000790Build
791-----
792
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000793- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
794 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
795 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
796
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000797- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
798 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
799 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
800 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
801 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000802
803C API
804-----
805
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000806- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
807 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
808
809- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
810
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000811- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
812 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
813 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
814 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
815 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
816 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
817 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
818 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
819 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
820
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000821- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
822
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000823- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
824 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
825 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000826
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000827Tests
828-----
829
830- test__locale ported to unittest
831
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000832Mac
833---
834
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000835- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
836 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
837 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000838
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000839Tools/Demos
840-----------
841
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000842- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
843 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
844 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
845 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
846 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000847
848
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000849What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
850=================================
851
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000852*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000853
854Core and builtins
855-----------------
856
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000857- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000858 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
859
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000860- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
861 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
862 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
863 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
864 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
865 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
866 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
867 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000868 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
869 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
870 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
871 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
872 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000873
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000874- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
875 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
876 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
877 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
878 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
879
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000880- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
881
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000882- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
883 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
884
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000885- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
886 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
887 modified the list.
888
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000889- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
890 functions is now writable.
891
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000892- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
893 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
894 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
895 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
896
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000897- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
898 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
899 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
900 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
901 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000902
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000903- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
904 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
905
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000906Extension modules
907-----------------
908
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000909- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
910
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000911- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
912 data.
913
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000914- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
915 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
916 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
917 supposed to have been truncated away.
918
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000919- Added socket.socketpair().
920
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000921- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
922 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
923
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000924- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000925 versions of Python, have now been removed.
926
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000927Library
928-------
929
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000930- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000931 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000932
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000933- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
934 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
935
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000936- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
937 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
938
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000939- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
940
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000941- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
942 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000943
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000944- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
945 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
946
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000947- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
948
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000949- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
950
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000951- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
952
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000953- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
954 Percivall.
955
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000956- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
957 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
958
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000959- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
960 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
961 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000962 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000963
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000964- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
965 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
966 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
967 and exponent.
968
969- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
970
971- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +0000972 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000973 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
974
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000975- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
976 to the readline module.
977
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000978- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000979 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
980 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000981
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000982- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
983 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
984 contains symlinks.
985
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000986- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
987 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
988
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000989- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
990 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
991 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
992
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000993- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
994 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
995 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
996 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
997 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
998 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
999 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1000 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1001 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1002 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1003 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1004 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1005 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1006
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001007- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1008
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001009Tools/Demos
1010-----------
1011
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001012- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1013 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1014
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001015- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1016
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001017Build
1018-----
1019
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001020- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1021 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1022 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1023 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1024 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1025 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1026 plans to do so.
1027
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001028- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1029 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1030
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001031- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1032 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1033
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001034- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1035 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1036
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001037- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1038 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1039
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001040- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1041 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1042
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001043C API
1044-----
1045
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001046..
1047
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001048Documentation
1049-------------
1050
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001051- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1052 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1053
1054- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1055 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1056 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001057
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001058New platforms
1059-------------
1060
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001061- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1062
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001063Tests
1064-----
1065
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001066..
1067
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001068Windows
1069-------
1070
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001071- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1072 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1073 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1074 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1075 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1076 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1077 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1078 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1079 the problem.
1080
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001081Mac
1082---
1083
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001084..
1085
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001086
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001087What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1088=================================
1089
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001090*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001091
1092Core and builtins
1093-----------------
1094
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001095- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1096 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1097 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1098 sensitive code.
1099
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001100- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001101 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001102
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001103 @staticmethod
1104 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001105
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001106 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001107
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001108- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1109 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1110 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1111 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1112 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1113 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1114 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1115 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1116 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1117 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1118 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1119
1120 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1121 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1122 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1123 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1124 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1125 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1126 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1127
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001128- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1129 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1130
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001131- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001132 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001133
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001134- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001135 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001136 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1137
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001138- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001139 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1140 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1141
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001142- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1143 types that support garbage collection.
1144
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001145- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1146
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001147- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1148 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1149 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1150 Jython.
1151
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001152- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1153
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001154- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1155 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1156
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001157- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1158 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1159 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001160
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001161- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1162 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1163 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1164
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001165Extension modules
1166-----------------
1167
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001168- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1169
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001170Library
1171-------
1172
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001173- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1174 TIS-620
1175
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001176- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1177 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1178 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1179 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1180 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1181 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1182 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1183 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1184 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1185 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1186
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001187- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1188
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001189- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1190 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1191 same as when the argument is omitted).
1192 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1193
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001194- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1195
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001196- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1197 schemes are offered.
1198
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001199- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1200
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001201- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1202 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1203 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1204
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001205- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1206
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001207- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1208 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1209
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001210- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1211 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1212 when dummy_threading is being used.
1213
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001214- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1215 from a tarfile.
1216
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001217- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001218 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001219
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001220- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1221 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1222 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1223 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1224
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001225- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1226 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1227
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001228- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1229 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1230 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1231 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1232 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1233 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1234 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1235 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1236 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1237 by some other method in progress).
1238
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001239- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1240 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1241 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001242
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001243- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1244
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001245- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1246 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1247 AM Kuchling.
1248
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001249- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1250 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1251 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1252
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001253- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1254 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1255 instead of unsigned.
1256
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001257- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001258 no longer part of the public API.
1259
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001260- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1261 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1262 string methods of the same name).
1263
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001264- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001265 SF patch 945642.
1266
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001267- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1268
1269 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1270
1271 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1272 DocTestSuites.
1273
1274- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1275 that provide thread-local data.
1276
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001277- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1278 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1279
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001280- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1281
1282- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1283 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1284 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1285
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001286- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1287
1288 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1289 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1290 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001291
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001292 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1293 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1294 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1295 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1296
1297 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1298 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1299
1300 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1301 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1302 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1303 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1304
1305 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1306 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1307 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1308 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1309 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1310
1311 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1312 wrapping help output.
1313
1314 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1315 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1316 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001317
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001318C API
1319-----
1320
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001321- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1322 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1323 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1324 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1325 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1326 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1327 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1328 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1329 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1330 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1331 its visible semantics have not changed.
1332
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001333- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1334 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1335
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001336Documentation
1337-------------
1338
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001339- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001340
1341 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001342 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001343
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001344 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001345
1346 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1347
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001348- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001349
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001350Tests
1351-----
1352
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001353- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001354 platforms that use the Makefile.
1355
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001356- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1357 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1358 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1359
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001360
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001361What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1362=================================
1363
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001364*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001365
1366Core and builtins
1367-----------------
1368
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001369- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1370 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1371 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1372 objects now (one object instead of three).
1373
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001374- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1375 Windows DLLs.
1376
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001377- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1378 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001379
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001380- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1381 a new .pyc magic.
1382
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001383- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1384 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1385 be there.
1386
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001387- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1388 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1389 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1390
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001391- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1392 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1393 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1394
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001395- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1396
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001397- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1398 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1399 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001400
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001401- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1402 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1403
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001404- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1405
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001406- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001407 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001408
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001409- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1410
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001411- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1412
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001413- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1414 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1415
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001416- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1417 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1418 Fixes bug #858016 .
1419
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001420- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1421 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1422 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1423
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001424- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1425 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1426 improves their performance (about 35%).
1427
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001428- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1429 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1430 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1431
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001432- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1433 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1434 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1435 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1436
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001437- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1438 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001439 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001440 length is not known).
1441
1442- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1443 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001444 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1445 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001446 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1447
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001448- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1449 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1450
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001451- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1452 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1453 keyword arguments.
1454
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001455- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1456 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1457 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1458
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001459- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1460 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1461 cases.
1462
1463- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1464 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1465 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1466 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1467 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1468 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1469 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1470 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1471 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1472 a release build.
1473
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001474- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1475 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1476
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001477- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001478 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001479
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001480- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1481 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1482 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1483 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1484 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1485 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1486 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1487 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1488 destroyed.
1489
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001490- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1491 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1492 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1493 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1494 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1495 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1496 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1497 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1498
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001499- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1500 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1501 character other than a space.
1502
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001503- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1504 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1505 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1506 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1507 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1508 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1509 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1510 attributes with the same name.
1511
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001512- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1513 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1514 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1515 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1516 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1517 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1518 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1519 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1520 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1521 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1522 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1523 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1524 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1525 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001526
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001527- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1528 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1529 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1530 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1531 This has been repaired.
1532
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001533- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1534
1535- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1536
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001537- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1538 over a sequence.
1539
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001540- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001541 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001542
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001543- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1544
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001545- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1546 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1547 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1548 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1549 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1550 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1551 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1552 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1553
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001554- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1555 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1556 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1557
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001558- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1559 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1560 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1561 freelist.
1562
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001563- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1564 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1565
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001566- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1567 number.
1568
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001569- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1570 a TypeError exception.
1571
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001572- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1573 820195.
1574
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001575- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1576 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1577 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1578
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001579- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001580 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1581 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001582
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001583- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1584 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1585 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1586
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001587- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1588 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001589 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001590
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001591- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001592 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1593 the first call.
1594
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001595
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001596Extension modules
1597-----------------
1598
Georg Brandl33a5f2a2005-08-21 14:16:04 +00001599- Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines() for files containing one line without
1600 newlines.
1601
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001602- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1603 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1604
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001605- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1606 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1607 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1608 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1609 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1610 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1611 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001612
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001613- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1614
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001615- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1616
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001617- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1618 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1619
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001620- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1621 fewer false positives.
1622
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001623- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1624 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1625
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001626- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001627 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1628
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001629- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001630 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001631 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001632 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1633 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001634
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001635- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1636 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1637 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1638 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1639
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001640- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1641 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1642 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1643 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1644 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1645 #897625.
1646
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001647- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1648 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1649
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001650- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1651 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1652 and pops on either side of the deque.
1653
1654- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1655 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1656
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001657- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1658 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1659 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1660 other functions that expect a function argument.
1661
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001662- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1663
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001664- os.getsid was added.
1665
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001666- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1667 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1668 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1669
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001670- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1671
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001672- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1673
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001674- readline.clear_history was added.
1675
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001676- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1677
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001678- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1679
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001680- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1681
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001682- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1683
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001684- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1685
1686- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1687
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001688- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1689
1690- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1691
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001692- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1693 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1694 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1695
1696- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1697 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1698 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1699 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1700 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1701 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1702 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1703
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001704- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1705 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1706 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1707 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001708
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001709- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001710 iterators from a single iterable.
1711
1712- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1713 of raising a TypeError exception.
1714
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001715- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1716 as parameter.
1717
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001718Library
1719-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001720
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001721- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1722
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001723- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1724 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1725 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001726
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001727- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1728 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1729 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001730
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001731- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001732
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001733- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1734 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001735
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001736- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1737 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1738
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001739- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1740
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001741- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001742 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001743
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001744- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001745 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001746
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001747- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1748
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001749- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1750 on cygwin and mingw32.
1751
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001752- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1753
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001754- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1755 module.
1756
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001757- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1758 installation scheme for all platforms.
1759
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001760- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001761 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001762
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001763- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1764 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1765 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1766
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001767- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1768 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1769 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1770
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001771- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1772
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001773- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1774
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001775- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1776 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1777
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001778- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1779 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1780 type pattern with the same value exists.
1781
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001782- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1783 when run from the command prompt).
1784
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001785- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1786 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1787
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001788- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1789 default sort).
1790
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001791- Added global runctx function to profile module
1792
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001793- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1794
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001795- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1796
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001797- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1798
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001799- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001800 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1801 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1802 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1803 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1804 accordingly.
1805
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001806- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1807 decoding standards.
1808
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001809- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1810 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1811 called for all requests.
1812
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001813- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1814 they are passed to the compiler.
1815
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001816- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1817 indent, width and depth.
1818
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001819- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1820 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1821
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001822- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1823 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1824
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001825- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1826
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001827- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1828
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001829- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1830
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001831- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1832 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1833
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001834- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001835 for better performance.
1836
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001837- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001838
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001839- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1840 a string).
1841
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001842- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1843
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001844- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1845
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001846- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1847
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001848- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1849
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001850- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1851 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1852 list of fieldnames.
1853
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001854- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1855 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1856
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001857- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1858
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001859- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1860 empty lists.
1861
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001862- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1863 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1864 and shelves.
1865
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001866- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1867 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1868
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001869- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001870 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1871 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001872
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001873- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1874 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001875 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001876
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001877- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001878 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1879 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1880
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001881- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1882 and removed in Py2.4.
1883
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001884- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1885
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001886- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1887
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001888Tools/Demos
1889-----------
1890
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001891- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1892 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1893
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001894- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1895
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001896- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1897 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1898 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1899 destination in situations where both files are given.
1900
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001901- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1902 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1903 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1904 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1905
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001906- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1907
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001908- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1909 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1910 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1911 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1912 now.
1913
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001914- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1915 in effect
1916
1917- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1918 C-c C-h
1919
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001920- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1921 -d option was given.
1922
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001923Build
1924-----
1925
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001926- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1927 build under OS X.
1928
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001929- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1930 --enable-profiling.
1931
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001932- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1933 is configured --with-tsc.
1934
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001935- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1936 on AMD64.
1937
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001938- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1939 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1940
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001941- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1942 removed.
1943
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001944- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1945 supported (see PEP 11).
1946
1947- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1948
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001949- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1950
1951- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1952 (see PEP 11).
1953
1954- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1955 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1956
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001957C API
1958-----
1959
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001960- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1961 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1962 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1963
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001964- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1965 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1966 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1967 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1968
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001969- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1970 generator objects.
1971
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001972- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1973 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001974 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1975 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001976
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001977- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1978 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1979
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001980- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1981 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1982 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1983 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1984 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1985
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001986- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1987 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1988 about 10% faster.
1989
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001990- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1991 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1992
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001993- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1994 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1995 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1996 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1997
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001998Windows
1999-------
2000
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002001- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2002 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2003 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2004 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2005
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002006- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2007 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2008 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2009
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002010
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002011What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2012===============================
2013
2014*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2015
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002016IDLE
2017----
2018
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002019- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2020 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2021 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2022 context-menu actions.
2023
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002024- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2025 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2026 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2027 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2028 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2029 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2030 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2031 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2032 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2033
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002034
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002035What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2036=============================================
2037
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002038*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002039
2040Core and builtins
2041-----------------
2042
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002043- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002044 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002045 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2046
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002047Extension modules
2048-----------------
2049
2050- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2051 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2052 than once. This has been fixed.
2053
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002054- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2055 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2056 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2057 call.
2058
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002059- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2060
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002061Library
2062-------
2063
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002064- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2065 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2066
2067- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2068 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2069 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2070 restored.
2071
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002072IDLE
2073----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002074
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002075- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002076
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002077Build
2078-----
2079
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002080- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2081 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2082
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002083C API
2084-----
2085
2086Windows
2087-------
2088
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002089- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2090 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2091
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002092- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2093
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002094Mac
2095---
2096
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002097- Various fixes to pimp.
2098
2099- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2100
2101- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2102 more problems than it solves.
2103
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002104
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002105What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2106=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002107
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002108*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2109
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002110Core and builtins
2111-----------------
2112
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002113- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2114 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2115
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002116- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2117 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002118 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002119
2120- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2121 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2122 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002123 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002124
2125- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2126 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002127
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002128- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2129 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2130 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2131
2132- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002133 770247.
2134
2135- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002136
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002137Extension modules
2138-----------------
2139
2140- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2141 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2142
2143- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2144
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002145- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2146
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002147- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2148 contained within the _strptime module.
2149
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002150- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2151 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2152
2153- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002154 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2155
2156- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2157 the find_class attribute, if present.
2158
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002159- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002160
2161 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2162 (SF bug 763298).
2163
2164 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002165 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2166 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2167 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002168
2169 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2170
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002171Library
2172-------
2173
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002174- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2175
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002176- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2177 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2178 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2179 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2180 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2181 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2182 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2183 or Tester().
2184
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002185- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2186 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2187 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2188 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2189 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2190 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2191 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2192 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2193 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002194
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002195 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002196
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002197- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2198 weren't before was an oversight.
2199
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002200- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2201 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2202
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002203- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2204 when there are no lines.
2205
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002206- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2207 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2208
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002209- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2210 to child processes.
2211
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002212- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2213
2214- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2215
2216- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2217 xmlrpclib.
2218
2219- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2220 responses.
2221
2222- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2223 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2224
2225- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2226 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2227 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2228
2229- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2230 used as patterns.
2231
2232- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2233 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2234 than Tk 8.3.
2235
2236- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2237
2238- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002239
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002240Tools/Demos
2241-----------
2242
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002243- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2244
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002245- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2246
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002247- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002248
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002249Build
2250-----
2251
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002252- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2253
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002254- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2255
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002256- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2257 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002258
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002259- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2260 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2261 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002262
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002263C API
2264-----
2265
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002266- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2267 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2268
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002269Windows
2270-------
2271
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002272- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2273 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2274 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2275 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2276 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2277 Python exception ::
2278
2279 thread.error: can't start new thread
2280
2281 is raised now.
2282
2283- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2284 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2285 instead of from DLL teardown.
2286
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002287Mac
2288---
2289
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002290- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002291 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002292 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2293 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2294 the executable in the bundle.
2295
2296- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002297
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002298- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2299
2300- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2301 on Panther.
2302
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002303What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2304================================
2305
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002306*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002307
2308Core and builtins
2309-----------------
2310
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002311- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2312 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2313 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2314 with the -i option.
2315
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002316- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2317 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2318
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002319- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2320 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2321
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002322- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2323 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2324 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2325 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2326 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2327 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2328 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2329 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2330 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2331 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2332 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2333 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2334 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002335
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002336- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2337 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2338 embedded in a lambda expression.
2339
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002340- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2341 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2342 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2343 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2344 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2345
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002346- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2347 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2348 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2349
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002350- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2351 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2352
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002353- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2354 It's writable again.
2355
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002356- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2357 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2358 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002359 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002360
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002361- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2362 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2363 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2364
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002365Extension modules
2366-----------------
2367
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002368- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2369 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2370
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002371- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2372 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2373 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2374 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2375
2376- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2377 collection.
2378
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002379- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2380 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2381 unique within a single program run.
2382
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002383- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2384 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2385
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002386- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2387 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2388
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002389- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2390 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002391
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002392- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2393
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002394- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2395 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2396
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002397- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2398 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2399 for many BSD-derived systems.
2400
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002401
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002402Library
2403-------
2404
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002405- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2406 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2407 primary ones:
2408
2409 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2410 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2411 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2412
2413 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2414 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2415 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2416 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2417 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2418 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2419
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002420- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2421 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2422 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2423 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2424 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2425 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2426 argument.
2427
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002428- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2429 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2430 in the archive.
2431
2432- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2433 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2434
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002435- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2436 569574).
2437
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002438- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2439 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2440 no more.
2441
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002442- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2443 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2444 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2445 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2446 code coverage.
2447
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002448- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2449 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2450 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002451 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2452 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002453
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002454- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2455 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2456 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002457 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002458
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002459- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2460
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002461- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2462 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2463 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2464 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2465
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002466- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2467 handling.
2468
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002469- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2470 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2471
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002472- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2473 in socket.py.
2474
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002475- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2476
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002477- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2478 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2479 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2480 opener with proxy support.
2481
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002482- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2483
2484- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2485
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002486Tools/Demos
2487-----------
2488
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002489- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2490
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002491- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2492
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002493- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2494 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002495
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002496- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2497 files.
2498
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002499Build
2500-----
2501
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002502- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002503 different root directory.
2504
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002505C API
2506-----
2507
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002508- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2509 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2510 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2511 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2512 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2513 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2514 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2515 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2516 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2517 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2518
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002519- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2520 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2521 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2522 from Python.
2523
2524
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002525New platforms
2526-------------
2527
2528None this time.
2529
2530Tests
2531-----
2532
2533- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2534 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2535
2536Windows
2537-------
2538
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002539- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2540
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002541- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2542 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2543 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2544 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2545 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2546 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2547 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2548 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2549 that's what it's for.
2550
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002551Mac
2552---
2553
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002554- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2555 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2556 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2557 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002558- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2559 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2560- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002561
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002562SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2563------------------------------------
2564
2565430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2566598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2567622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2568661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2569683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2570697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2571713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2572724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2573727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2574729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2575730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2576731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2577732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2578733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2579735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2580740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2581744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2582745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2583747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2584749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2585751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2586753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2587755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2588757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2589760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2590
2591
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002592What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2593================================
2594
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002595*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002596
2597Core and builtins
2598-----------------
2599
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002600- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2601 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2602
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002603- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2604 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2605 and cannot be strings).
2606
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002607- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2608 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2609 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2610 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2611
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002612- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2613 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2614 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2615 Python itself.
2616
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002617- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2618 the referenced object, if it has one.
2619
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002620- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2621 the thread started at
2622 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2623
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002624- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2625 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2626 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2627 placed on a list index.
2628
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002629- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2630 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2631 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2632 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2633
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002634- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2635 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2636 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2637 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2638 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2639 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2640 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2641
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002642- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2643 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2644 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2645 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2646 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2647
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002648- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2649 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002650
2651- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2652 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2653 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2654 #693195.)
2655
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002656- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2657 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002658
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002659- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002660 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002661 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2662 interpreter executions, would fail.
2663
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002664- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002665 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002666 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002667
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002668Extension modules
2669-----------------
2670
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002671- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2672 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2673 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2674 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2675
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002676- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2677 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2678
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002679- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2680 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2681 and Greg Chapman.)
2682
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002683- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2684 recursively.
2685
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002686- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002687 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2688 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2689 leaks.
2690
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002691- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2692
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002693- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2694 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2695 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2696 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2697 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2698 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2699 #705836.
2700
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002701- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002702 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2703
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002704- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2705 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2706 See SF bug #692416.
2707
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002708- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2709 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2710
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002711- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2712 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2713 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002714
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002715- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002716 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2717 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2718
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002719- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2720 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2721 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2722 timeouts to work properly.
2723
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002724Library
2725-------
2726
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002727- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2728 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2729 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2730 future release.
2731
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002732- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2733 for querying platform dependent features.
2734
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002735- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002736
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002737- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2738 pickle protocol versions.
2739
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002740- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2741 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2742 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2743
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002744- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2745
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002746- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2747 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2748 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2749 modules.
2750
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002751- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2752 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2753 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2754
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002755- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2756 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2757
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002758- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2759 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2760 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2761
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002762- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002763 MS Office extensions.
2764
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002765- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2766 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2767
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002768- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2769 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2770
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002771- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2772 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2773 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2774 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2775 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2776 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2777
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002778- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2779 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2780 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002781
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002782- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2783 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2784 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2785
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002786- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2787
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002788- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2789 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2790 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2791
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002792Tools/Demos
2793-----------
2794
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002795- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2796 See the module docstring for details.
2797
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002798Build
2799-----
2800
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002801- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2802 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002803
2804C API
2805-----
2806
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002807- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2808
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002809- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2810 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2811 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2812
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002813- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2814 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002815
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002816 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2817 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2818 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002819
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002820- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002821 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2822
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002823- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2824 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2825 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002826
2827New platforms
2828-------------
2829
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002830None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002831
2832Tests
2833-----
2834
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002835- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2836 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002837
2838Windows
2839-------
2840
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002841- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2842 function.
2843
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002844- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2845 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002846
2847Mac
2848---
2849
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002850- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2851 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002852
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002853- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2854 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002855
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002856- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2857 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2858 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002859
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002860- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002861 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2862 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002863
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002864- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2865 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002866
2867
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002868What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2869=================================
2870
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002871*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002872
2873Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002874-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002875
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002876- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2877 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2878 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2879
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002880- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2881 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2882 (SF patch #664376.)
2883
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002884- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2885 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2886 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2887 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2888 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2889 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002890 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002891
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002892- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2893 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2894 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2895 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002896 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002897
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002898- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2899 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2900 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2901 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2902 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2903 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2904 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2905 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2906 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2907 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2908 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2909
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002910- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2911 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2912 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2913 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2914 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2915 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2916
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002917- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2918 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2919
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002920- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2921 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2922 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2923 case.)
2924
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002925- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2926 passed as unicode strings.
2927
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002928- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2929 See SF bug #683467.
2930
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002931- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2932 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2933
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002934- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2935
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002936- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2937
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002938- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2939 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2940 arguments.
2941
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002942- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2943 See SF bug #667147.
2944
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002945- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002946 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002947 See SF bug #676155.
2948
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002949- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002950 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002951 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2952 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2953 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2954 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2955 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2956 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002957
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002958Extension modules
2959-----------------
2960
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002961- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2962 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2963 tp_as_number pointer.
2964
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002965- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2966 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2967 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2968 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2969 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2970
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002971- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2972
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002973- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2974
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002975- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002976 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002977 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2978 patch #678531.)
2979
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002980- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2981 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2982
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002983- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2984 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2985
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002986- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2987
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002988- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2989 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2990 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2991
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002992- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2993
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002994- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2995 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2996
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002997- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002998
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002999- datetime changes:
3000
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003001 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3002
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003003 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3004 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3005 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3006 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3007 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3008 now.
3009
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003010 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003011 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3012 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003013
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003014 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003015 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003016 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3017 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3018 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3019 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003020
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003021 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3022 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3023 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003024 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3025
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003026 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3027 by a later example coded by Guido.
3028
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003029 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003030 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3031 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3032 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003033 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3034 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3035
3036 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3037 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3038 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3039 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3040 tzinfo subclass instance.
3041
3042 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3043 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3044 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3045 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3046 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3047 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3048 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3049 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003050
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003051 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3052 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3053 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3054 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3055 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003056 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3057
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003058 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003059
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003060 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3061 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3062 as a naive datetime object.
3063
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003064 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3065 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3066 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3067
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003068 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3069 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3070 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3071 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3072 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3073 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3074 comparison.
3075
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003076 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3077 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3078 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3079 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003080 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003081
3082 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003083
3084 and ::
3085
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003086 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3087
3088 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3089 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3090 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3091 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3092
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003093 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3094 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3095 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3096 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3097 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3098
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003099 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3100 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003101 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3102 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003103
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003104Library
3105-------
3106
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003107- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3108 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3109
3110- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3111 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3112 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3113 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3114 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3115 See PEP 307 for details.
3116
3117- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3118 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3119
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003120- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3121 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003122 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003123 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3124 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003125 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003126
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003127- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3128 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3129
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003130- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3131 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3132 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3133
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003134- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3135
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003136- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3137 exception.
3138
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003139- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3140 class.
3141
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003142- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3143 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3144 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3145
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003146- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3147 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3148
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003149- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003150 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3151 See SF bug #659228.
3152
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003153- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3154 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3155 See SF patch #651082.
3156
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003157- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003158
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003159- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3160 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3161
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003162- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003163 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003164
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003165- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3166 DOS paths from other platforms.
3167
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003168Tools/Demos
3169-----------
3170
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003171- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3172 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3173 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3174 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3175 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3176 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3177 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3178 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3179 example:
3180
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003181 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3182 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003183
3184 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3185
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003186
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003187Build
3188-----
3189
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003190- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3191 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3192 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003193 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3194
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003195 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3196
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003197- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3198 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3199 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3200 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3201 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3202 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3203 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3204 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3205 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3206
3207- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3208 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3209 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3210 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3211
3212- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3213 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3214
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003215C API
3216-----
3217
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003218- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3219 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003220
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003221- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3222 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3223 tp_as_number pointer.
3224
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003225- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3226 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3227 (SF #681367)
3228
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003229- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3230 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3231 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3232 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003233
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003234Tests
3235-----
3236
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003237- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003238 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3239 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3240 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3241 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3242 pydoc.)
3243
3244- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3245
3246- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003247
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003248Windows
3249-------
3250
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003251- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3252 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3253 time).
3254
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003255- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3256 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3257
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003258- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3259 release without strong cryptography.
3260
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003261- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003262 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003263
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003264- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3265 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3266
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003267Mac
3268---
3269
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003270- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3271 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003272
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003273- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3274 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3275 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003276
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003277- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3278 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003279
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003280- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3281 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3282 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3283 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003284
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003285- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003286 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3287 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3288 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003289
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003290
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003291What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003292=================================
3293
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003294*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003295
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003296Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003297--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003298
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003299- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3300
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003301- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3302 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003303 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003304 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003305 a different meaning than before.
3306
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003307- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003308 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003309 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003310
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003311- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003312 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003313 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003314
3315- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3316 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3317 and deallocation.
3318
3319- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3320 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3321
3322- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3323 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3324 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3325 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3326 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3327
3328- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3329 now detected by the garbage collector.
3330
3331- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3332 [SF bug 519621]
3333
3334- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3335 identifier.
3336
3337- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3338 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3339 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3340 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3341 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3342 [SF bug 563060]
3343
3344- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3345 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3346 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3347 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3348 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3349
3350- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3351 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3352 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3353
3354- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3355
3356- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3357 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3358 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3359 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3360 state of the slots would be lost.)
3361
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003362Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003363-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003364
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003365- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003366 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3367 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3368 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3369 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003370 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3371 Jython 2.1.
3372
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003373- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003374 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003375 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3376 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3377 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3378 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3379 these, see PEP 302.
3380
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003381- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3382 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3383 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3384
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003385- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3386 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3387 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3388
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003389- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3390 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3391 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3392
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003393- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3394 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3395 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3396 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3397 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3398 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3399 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3400 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3401 releases or implementations.
3402
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003403- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003404 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3405 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003406
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003407- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3408 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3409
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003410- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3411 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3412 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3413
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003414- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3415 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3416
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003417- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3418 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003419 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3420 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003421
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003422- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3423 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3424 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3425 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3426 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3427
3428 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3429 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3430 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3431 pattern.
3432
3433 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3434 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3435 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3436 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3437
3438 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3439 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3440 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3441 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3442 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3443 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3444
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003445- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3446 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3447 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3448 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3449 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3450 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3451 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3452 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003453
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003454- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3455 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3456 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3457 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3458 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003459 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3460 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3461 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3462 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3463 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3464 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3465 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003466
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003467- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3468 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3469
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003470- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3471 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3472 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3473 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3474 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3475 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3476 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3477 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3478 to Zack Weinberg!
3479
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003480- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3481 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3482 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3483 type. This has been fixed now.
3484
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003485- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3486 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3487 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3488
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003489- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3490 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3491 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3492 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3493 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3494 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3495 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3496 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003497 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003498
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003499- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3500 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3501 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003502
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003503- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3504 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3505 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3506 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3507 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3508 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3509 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3510 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003511 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003512 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3513 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3514
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003515- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3516 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3517 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3518 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3519 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3520 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3521 this.)
3522
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003523- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3524 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003525 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003526 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003527 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3528 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003529 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3530 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003531
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003532- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3533 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3534 currently running.
3535
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003536- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3537 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3538 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3539 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3540
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003541- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3542 as directory names.
3543
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003544- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3545 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3546
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003547- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3548 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3549
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003550- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003551 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3552 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003553
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003554- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3555 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3556 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3557 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3558 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3559
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003560- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3561 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3562 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3563 removed.
3564
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003565- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3566 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3567 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3568
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003569- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3570 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3571 to __debug__.
3572
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003573- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3574 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3575 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3576
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003577- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3578 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3579 deprecated now.
3580
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003581- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3582 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3583 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003584
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003585- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3586 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3587 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3588 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3589 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003590
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003591- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3592 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3593
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003594- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3595 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3596 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003597 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003598 is backward compatible.
3599
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003600- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3601 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3602 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3603 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3604 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3605
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003606- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3607 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3608 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3609 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3610 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3611 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003612
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003613- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3614 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3615
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003616- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3617 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3618
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003619- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3620 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3621 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3622 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3623 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3624
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003625- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3626 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3627 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3628
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003629- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003630 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3631
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003632- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3633 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3634 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003635
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003636- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3637 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3638
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003639- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3640 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3641 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3642
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003643- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3644
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003645Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003646-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003647
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003648- Added three operators to the operator module:
3649 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3650 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3651 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3652
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003653- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3654
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003655- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3656 archives.
3657
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003658- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3659 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3660 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3661
3662 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3663
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003664- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3665 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3666 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003667 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003668
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003669- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3670 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3671 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3672 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003673 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3674 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3675 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3676 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003677
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003678- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3679 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003680
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003681- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3682
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003683- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3684 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3685
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003686- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3687 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3688 supported.
3689
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003690- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3691
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003692- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3693 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003694
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003695- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3696 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3697
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003698- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3699
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003700- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3701 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3702
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003703- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3704 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3705 functions but callable type objects.
3706
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003707- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003708 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003709 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003710
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003711- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3712 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003713
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003714- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3715 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003716
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003717- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3718 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3719 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3720 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3721
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003722- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3723 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003724
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003725- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3726 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3727 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3728 and __imul__.
3729
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003730- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003731 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3732 is called.
3733
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003734- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3735 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3736 interpreter was compiled.
3737
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003738- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3739 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3740 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003741 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003742 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3743 1, not 2.
3744
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003745- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3746 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3747 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3748 limit.
3749
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003750- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3751 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3752 bug #623464.
3753
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003754- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3755 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3756 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3757 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3758
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003759Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003760-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003761
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003762- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3763
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003764- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3765 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3766 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3767 with Python 2.3a2.
3768
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003769- os.path exposes getctime.
3770
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003771- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003772 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003773 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003774 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003775 unit tests of floating point results.
3776
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003777- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3778 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3779 has been increased.
3780
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003781- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3782 executed.
3783
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003784- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3785 postinstallation script.
3786
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003787- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3788 test the current module.
3789
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003790- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003791 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3792 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3793 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3794 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3795
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003796- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003797 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003798 Ward's Optik package.
3799
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003800- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3801 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3802 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3803 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3804
3805- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3806 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003807 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003808
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003809- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3810 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3811 shelf are binary pickles.
3812
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003813- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3814 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3815
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003816- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3817 modules are iterators now.
3818
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003819- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3820 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3821 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3822 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3823 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3824 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003825
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003826- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3827 with their entity value.
3828
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003829- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3830
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003831- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3832 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003833
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003834- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3835 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003836 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003837
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003838- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3839 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3840 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3841 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3842 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3843 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3844 main():
3845
3846 import locale
3847 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3848
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003849- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3850 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3851
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003852- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3853 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3854 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3855 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3856 to the new standard.
3857
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003858- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3859 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3860 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3861 an extension to the database.
3862
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003863- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3864 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3865 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3866 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003867 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003868
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003869- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003870 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003871
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003872- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3873 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3874 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3875 bounded integers.
3876
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003877- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3878 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3879 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3880 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3881 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3882 in existence.
3883
3884 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3885 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3886 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3887 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3888 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3889 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3890
3891 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3892 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3893 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3894 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3895
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003896- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3897 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3898 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3899
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003900- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3901
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003902- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3903 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3904 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3905 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3906
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003907- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3908 argument.
3909
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003910- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3911 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3912 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3913 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3914 [SF patch 560794].
3915
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003916- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3917 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3918 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003919 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3920 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3921 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003922
3923- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3924 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003925
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003926- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3927 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3928 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3929 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003930
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003931- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3932 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3933 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3934 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3935 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3936
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003937- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003938
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003939- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3940
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003941- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3942 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3943 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3944 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3945 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3946 identical to None.
3947
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003948- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3949 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3950 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3951 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3952 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3953 results now.
3954
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003955- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3956 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3957
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003958- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3959 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3960 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3961 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3962 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3963 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3964 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3965 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3966
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003967- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3968
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003969- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3970 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3971
3972- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3973 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3974 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3975 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3976 and other systems.
3977
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003978- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3979 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3980 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3981 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 +00003982 work well with these.
3983
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003984- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3985
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003986- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003987 connections.
3988
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003989- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3990 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3991 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3992
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003993- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3994 sets
3995
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003996- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3997 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3998 name.
3999
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004000- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4001 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4002 passed in.
4003
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004004- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004005 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004006 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4007 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004008
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004009- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4010
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004011- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4012
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004013- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4014 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4015 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4016
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004017- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4018 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4019 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4020 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004021 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004022
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004023- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004024 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004025 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004026
4027- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4028 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4029 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4030
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004031- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004032 the value of its expression argument.
4033
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004034- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4035 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4036 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4037
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004038- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4039 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4040 skipstone browser was included.
4041
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004042- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4043 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4044
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004045Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004046-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004047
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004048- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4049 names in addition to accepting file names.
4050
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004051- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4052 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4053 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4054 still used and useful.)
4055
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004056- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4057 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4058 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4059 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004060
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004061- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4062 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4063 the generated binary.
4064
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004065Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004066-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004067
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004068- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4069
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004070- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4071 except in the hands of experts.
4072
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004073- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004074 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4075 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4076 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004077
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004078- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4079 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4080 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4081 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4082 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4083 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4084 builds.
4085
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004086- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4087 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4088 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4089 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4090 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4091 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4092 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4093 new type.
4094
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004095- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004096
4097 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4098 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4099 positive infinities.
4100
4101 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4102 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4103 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4104 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4105 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4106 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4107 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4108
4109 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4110
4111 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4112
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004113- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4114 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4115 size of the executable.
4116
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004117- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4118 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4119 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4120 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004121
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004122- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4123
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004124- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4125 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4126 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004127
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004128- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4129 well as Unix.
4130
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004131- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4132 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4133 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4134 modules in the README file for details.
4135
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004136C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004137-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004138
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004139- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4140 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004141 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004142 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004143 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004144
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004145- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4146 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4147 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4148 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4149 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4150 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004151 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004152 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4153 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4154 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4155 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4156 aligned.)
4157
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004158- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4159 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4160 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4161
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004162- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4163 level.
4164
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004165- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4166 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4167 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4168 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4169 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4170
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004171- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4172 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4173 code.
4174
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004175- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4176 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4177 adjusting for negative indices.
4178
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004179- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4180 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4181 object.
4182
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004183- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4184 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4185 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4186
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004187- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4188 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004189
4190- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4191
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004192- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4193 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4194 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4195 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4196
4197- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4198
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004199- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004200
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004201- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004202 without going through the buffer API.
4203
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004204- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004205
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004206- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4207 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4208 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4209 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4210
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004211- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4212 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4213
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004214- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004215 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4216
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004217New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004218-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004219
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004220- OpenVMS is now supported.
4221
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004222- AtheOS is now supported.
4223
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004224- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4225
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004226- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4227
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004228Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004229-----
4230
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004231- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4232 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4233 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004234
4235Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004236-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004237
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004238- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4239 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4240 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4241 bugs.
4242 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004243 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004244 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4245 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004246 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004247
4248- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004249 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004250
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004251- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4252 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4253
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004254- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4255 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004256 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004257 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4258
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004259- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4260 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4261 use files" uninstall option).
4262
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004263- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4264
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004265- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4266 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4267
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004268- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4269 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4270 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4271
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004272- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4273 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4274 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4275 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4276 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004277 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4278 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4279 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004280
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004281- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004282 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004283 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4284 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4285 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4286 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4287 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4288 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4289 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4290 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4291 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4292 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4293 work around.
4294
4295- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4296 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4297 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4298 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4299 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4300 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4301 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4302 specified with O_CREAT too).
4303
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004304Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004305----
4306
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004307- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004308
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004309- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4310 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4311 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4312
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004313- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4314 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4315 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4316
4317- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4318 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4319 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4320 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4321 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4322 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4323 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4324 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004325
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004326- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4327 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4328 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004329
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004330- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4331 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4332 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4333 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4334 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004335
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004336- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4337 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4338 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004339
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004340- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4341 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004342
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004343- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4344 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4345 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4346 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4347 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004348
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004349- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4350 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4351 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4352
4353- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4354 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4355 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004356
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004357- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4358 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4359 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4360 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004361 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004362
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004363- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4364 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004365
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004366- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4367 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004368
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004369- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004370 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004371 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4372 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004373
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004374
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004375What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004376===============================
4377
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004378*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4379
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004380Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004381--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004382
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004383- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4384 with a custom metaclass.
4385
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004386Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004387-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004388
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004389- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4390 are proxies.
4391
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004392Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004393-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004394
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004395- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4396 very short strings.
4397
4398- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4399 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4400 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4401 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4402 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4403
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004404Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004405-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004406
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004407- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4408 close or delete time).
4409
4410- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4411 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4412
4413- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4414
4415- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004416 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004417
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004418Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004419-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004420
4421Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004422-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004423
4424C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004425-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004426
4427New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004428-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004429
4430Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004431-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004432
4433Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004434-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004435
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004436- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4437
4438- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4439 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4440
4441- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4442 deleted at process exit time.
4443
4444- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4445 in backslash.
4446
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004447Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004448----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004449
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004450- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4451 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4452 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4453
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004454
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004455What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004456===========================
4457
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004458*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4459
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004460Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004461--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004462
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004463- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4464 been extensively updated. See
4465
4466 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4467
4468 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4469
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004470- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4471 deleted!
4472
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004473- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4474 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4475 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4476 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4477 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4478
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004479- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4480
4481 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4482 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4483
4484 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4485 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4486 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4487 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4488 supported anyway.
4489
4490 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4491 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4492
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004493- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4494 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4495 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4496 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4497 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004498
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004499- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4500 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4501 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4502
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004503Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004504-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004505
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004506- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4507 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4508 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4509 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4510 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4511 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004512 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4513 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4514 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4515 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004516
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004517- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4518 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4519 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4520
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004521Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004522-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004523
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004524- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4525
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004526Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004527-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004528
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004529- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4530 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4531 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4532 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4533 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4534 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4535
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004536- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4537
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004538- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4539
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004540- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4541
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004542- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4543 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4544 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4545
4546- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4547
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004548Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004549-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004550
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004551- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4552 off a search on Google.
4553
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004554Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004555-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004556
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004557- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4558 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4559 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4560 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4561 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4562 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4563 other platforms should do likewise.
4564
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004565- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4566 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4567 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4568
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004569C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004570-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004571
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004572- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4573 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4574 producing key-value pairs.
4575
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004576- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004577 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004578 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4579 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4580 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4581 previously went unchallenged.
4582
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004583New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004584-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004585
4586Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004587-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004588
4589Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004590-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004591
4592Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004593----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004594
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004595- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4596 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004597
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004598- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4599 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4600 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4601 home.
4602
4603
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004604What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004605===========================
4606
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004607*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4608
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004609Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004610--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004611
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004612- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4613 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004614
4615 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004616 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004617
4618 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4619 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004620 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004621 This needs to be documented.
4622
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004623- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4624 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4625
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004626- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4627 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4628 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4629
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004630- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4631 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4632
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004633- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4634 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4635 class forbids it).
4636
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004637- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4638 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4639 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4640
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004641- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4642
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004643Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004644-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004645
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004646- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4647 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004648 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004649
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004650- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4651 (like 1 + '').
4652
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004653Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004654-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004655
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004656- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4657 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4658 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4659 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004660 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004661 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4662
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004663- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4664 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4665 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4666 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4667
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004668- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4669 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004670 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4671 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4672 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004673
4674- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4675 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004676
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004677- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4678 bytes on its input.
4679
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004680Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004681-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004682
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004683- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004684 convenience function.
4685
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004686- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4687 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4688 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004689 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4690 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4691 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4692 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4693 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4694 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004695
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004696- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4697 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4698 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4699 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4700
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004701- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4702 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4703 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4704
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004705- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4706 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4707 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4708 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4709
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004710- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4711 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004712 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004713 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4714 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4715 new -l and -e options.
4716
4717- statcache is now deprecated.
4718
4719- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4720 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004721 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004722 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4723 time properly taken into account.
4724
4725- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4726 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4727 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4728 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4729
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004730Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004731-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004732
4733Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004734-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004735
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004736- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4737 is built with libdb3 if available.
4738
4739- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4740
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004741C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004742-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004743
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004744- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4745 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4746 PySequence_Size().
4747
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004748- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4749
4750- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4751 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4752 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4753
4754- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4755 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4756
4757- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4758 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4759
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004760New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004761-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004762
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004763- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4764 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4765
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004766- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4767 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4768
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004769- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4770
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004771Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004772-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004773
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004774- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4775 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4776
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004777Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004778-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004779
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004780Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004781----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004782
4783- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4784 removed completely in the next release.
4785
4786- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4787 OSX.
4788
4789- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4790 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4791
4792- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4793
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004794
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004795What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004796===========================
4797
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004798*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4799
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004800Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004801--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004802
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004803- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004804 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004805 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004806 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4807 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004808 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4809 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004810 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4811 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004812
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004813- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4814 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4815
4816- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4817 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4818
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004819Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004820-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004821
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004822- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4823 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4824 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4825 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4826 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4827 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4828 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4829 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4830
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004831- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4832 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4833 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4834 example).
4835
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004836- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004837 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004838 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004839 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004840
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004841- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4842 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4843 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004844 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004845
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004846- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4847 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4848 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4849 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4850 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4851 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4852
4853 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4854
4855 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4856
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004857Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004858-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004859
4860- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4861
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004862- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4863
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004864- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4865 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004866
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004867- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4868 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4869 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4870 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4871 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4872 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004873 attributes.
4874
4875- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4876 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4877 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004878
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004879- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4880 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4881 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004882
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004883- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4884 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4885 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004886 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4887 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4888
4889- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4890 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004891
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004892Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004893-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004894
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004895- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4896 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4897
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004898- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4899 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4900 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4901 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4902
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004903- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4904 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4905 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4906 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4907
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004908 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4909 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4910 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4911 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4912 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4913 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4914 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4915 without losing information).
4916
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004917- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004918 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4919 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4920 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4921 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4922 module).
4923
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004924 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004925 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4926 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4927 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4928 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004929
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004930- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004931 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4932 encoding.
4933
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004934- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4935 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4936
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004937- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004938 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4939
4940- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4941 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4942 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4943 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4944
4945- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4946
4947- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4948 ON, and OFF.
4949
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004950- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4951 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4952
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004953Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004954-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004955
4956- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4957 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4958 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004959
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004960- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4961 been added: -X and -E.
4962
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004963Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004964-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004965
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004966- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4967 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4968
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004969C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004970-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004971
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004972- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4973 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4974 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4975 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4976 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4977
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004978- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4979 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4980 as long) arguments.
4981
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004982- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4983 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4984 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4985 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4986 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4987 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4988
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004989- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4990 input.
4991
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004992New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004993-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004994
4995Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004996-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004997
4998Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004999-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005000
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005001- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5002 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5003 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5004
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005005- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5006 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5007 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005008 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005009
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005010 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5011 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5012 import signal
5013 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005014
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005015 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005016 while 1:
5017 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005018 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005019 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5020 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5021 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5022 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005023
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005024
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005025What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5026===========================
5027
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005028*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5029
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005030Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005031--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005032
5033- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5034 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5035 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5036
5037- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5038 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5039 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5040 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5041 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5042 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5043 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005044
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005045- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005046 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005047 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5048 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5049 associate a docstring with a property.
5050
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005051- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5052 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5053 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5054 other built-in object types.
5055
5056- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5057 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5058 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5059 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5060 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5061
5062- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5063 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5064
5065- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5066 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005067 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005068 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5069 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5070 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5071 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5072 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5073
5074- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5075 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5076 class.
5077
5078- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5079 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5080 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5081 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5082
5083- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5084 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5085 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5086 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5087
5088- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5089 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5090
5091- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5092 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5093 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5094 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5095 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005096 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005097 with the same value as s.
5098
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005099- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5100
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005101Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005102----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005103
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005104- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5105
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005106- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5107 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5108 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5109 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5110 objects.
5111
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005112- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5113 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005114 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5115 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5116
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005117- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5118 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5119 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5120
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005121Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005122-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005123
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005124- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5125 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5126 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5127 by the instances.
5128
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005129- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5130 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5131 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5132
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005133- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5134 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5135 before the entire comparison is complete.
5136
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005137- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5138 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5139 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5140
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005141- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5142 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5143 getwriter().
5144
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005145- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5146 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5147
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005148- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005149 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5150 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5151
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005152- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5153 iterable object.
5154
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005155- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5156 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005157
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005158- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5159 authentication.
5160
5161- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5162 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005163
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005164- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005165 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5166 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5167 a sample driver.)
5168
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005169Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005170-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005171
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005172- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5173 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5174 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5175 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5176 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5177 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5178 kernel has large file support.
5179
5180- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5181 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5182 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5183 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5184 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5185
5186- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5187 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5188 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5189
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005190C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005191-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005192
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005193- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5194 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5195
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005196New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005197-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005198
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005199- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5200 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5201
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005202Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005203-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005204
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005205- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5206 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5207 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5208 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5209 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5210
5211- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5212 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5213 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5214 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5215
5216- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5217 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5218
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005219Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005220-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005221
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005222- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005223 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5224 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005225
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005226
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005227What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5228===========================
5229
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005230*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5231
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005232Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005233----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005234
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005235- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5236 big to represent as a C double.
5237
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005238- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5239 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5240 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5241 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5242 restriction).
5243
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005244- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5245 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5246 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5247 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5248 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5249
5250 >>> dir([])
5251 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5252 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5253 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5254 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5255 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5256 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5257 'reverse', 'sort']
5258
5259 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5260
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005261- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005262 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5263 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5264 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5265 OverflowError exception.
5266
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005267- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005268 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005269 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5270 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5271 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5272 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5273 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005274 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005275 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5276 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5277
5278 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5279 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5280 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5281 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005282
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005283- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005284 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5285 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5286 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5287 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5288 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5289 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5290 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5291 once it is created.
5292
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005293- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5294 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5295 (key, value) pairs.
5296
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005297- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005298 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5299 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5300
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005301- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5302 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5303 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5304 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5305 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005306
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005307- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005308 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5309 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5310
5311 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5312
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005313- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005314 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5315
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005316Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005317-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005318
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005319- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005320 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5321 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005322
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005323- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5324 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5325 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5326 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5327 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5328 in this area anymore).
5329
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005330- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5331 threading.Timer.
5332
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005333- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5334 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5335
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005336- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005337 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5338
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005339- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005340 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5341 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5342 converted to Python longs.
5343
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005344- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005345 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5346
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005347- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5348 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5349 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5350
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005351Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005352-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005353
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005354- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5355 division operators as per PEP 238.
5356
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005357Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005358-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005359
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005360- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5361 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5362 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5363 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5364
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005365C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005366-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005367
5368- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005369
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005370- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5371 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005372 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005373
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005374 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5375 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005376 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005377 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005378
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005379- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005380 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5381 module:
5382
5383 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005384
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005385 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5386 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005387
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005388 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5389 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005390
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005391 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5392
5393 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5394
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005395- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005396 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5397 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5398 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005399
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005400New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005401-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005402
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005403- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5404 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5405 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5406 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5407 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005408
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005409Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005410-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005411
5412Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005413-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005414
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005415- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5416 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5417 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5418 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005419 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5420 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5421 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5422 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5423 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005424
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005425- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005426 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5427
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005428
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005429What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5430===========================
5431
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005432*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5433
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005434Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005435-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005436
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005437- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5438 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5439
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005440- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5441 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5442 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005443
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005444- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5445 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5446 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5447 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005448
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005449- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5450
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005451- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005452
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005453Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005454-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005455
5456- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005457 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005458 the module docstring for details.
5459
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005460Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005461-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005462
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005463- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005464 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5465 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5466 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005467
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005468- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5469 Nick Mathewson.
5470
5471Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005472----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005473
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005474- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5475 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5476 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5477 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5478 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5479 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5480 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5481 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5482
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005483- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5484 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5485 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5486 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5487
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005488- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5489 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5490 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5491 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5492 come a long way).
5493
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005494- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5495 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5496 write filters for these warnings).
5497
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005498- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5499 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5500 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5501 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5502 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5503
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005504- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5505 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5506 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5507 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5508 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5509 older distribution.
5510
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005511Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005512-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005513
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005514- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5515 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005516 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005517
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005518- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5519 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5520 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5521
5522- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5523
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005524- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5525
5526- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5527
5528- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5529
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005530- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005531
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005532- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5533
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005534New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005535-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005536
5537C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005538-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005539
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005540- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5541 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5542 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5543 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5544 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5545 against buffer overruns.
5546
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005547- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005548 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5549 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005550 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5551 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5552 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5553
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005554- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5555 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5556 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5557 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5558 deprecated.
5559
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005560Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005561-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005562
5563- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5564 relevant is found.
5565
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005566
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005567What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005568===========================
5569
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005570*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5571
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005572Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005573----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005574
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005575- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5576 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5577 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5578 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5579 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5580 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5581 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5582 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005583 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005584 repaired.
5585
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005586- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005587 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005588 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5589 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5590 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5591 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5592 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5593 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5594 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5595 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5596
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005597- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5598 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5599 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5600 leading BMO character).
5601
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005602- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5603 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5604 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5605
5606 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5607 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5608 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005609
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005610 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5611 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5612 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5613 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5614 for various simple to use conversions.
5615
5616 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5617 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5618
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005619 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5620 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5621 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5622 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5623 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5624 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5625 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5626 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5627 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5628 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5629 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5630 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5631 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5632 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5633 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005634
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005635- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5636 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5637 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005638 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005639 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005640
5641 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005642 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5643 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5644 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5645 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5646 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005647 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5648 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005649
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005650 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5651 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5652 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005653 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005654
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005655- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5656 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5657 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5658 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5659 floating arithmetic,
5660
5661 x = 9007199254740992.0
5662 print long(x)
5663
5664 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5665 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5666 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5667 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5668 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5669 functions are of good quality).
5670
5671 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5672 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5673 algorithms to break.
5674
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005675- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5676 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5677 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5678 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5679 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5680 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5681 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5682 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5683 order.
5684
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005685- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5686 operation along the most common code paths.
5687
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005688- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5689 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5690
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005691- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5692 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5693 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5694 {}.update(UserDict())
5695
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005696- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5697 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5698 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5699 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5700 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5701 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5702 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5703 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5704
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005705- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005706 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005707
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005708 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005709 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5710 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005711 join() method of strings
5712 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005713 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5714 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005715 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005716 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005717
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005718- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5719 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5720
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005721- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5722 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5723
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005724- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5725 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5726 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5727 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5728
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005729- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5730 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005731 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005732 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5733 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005734
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005735- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5736
5737
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005738Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005739-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005740
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005741- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005742 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005743 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5744 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5745
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005746- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5747 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5748
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005749- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5750 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5751 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5752 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5753
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005754- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5755 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5756 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5757
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005758- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5759
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005760- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5761
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005762- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5763 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5764 that are still imported into string.py).
5765
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005766- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5767
5768- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5769 Now it does.
5770
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005771- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5772
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005773- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5774 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5775 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5776 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5777 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005778 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5779 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005780
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005781- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5782 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5783 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5784 'help(object)'.
5785
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005786Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005787-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005788
5789- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005790 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005791 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5792 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5793
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005794- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005795 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5796 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005797
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005798C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005799-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005800
5801- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5802 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005803
5804----
5805
5806**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**