blob: 6bf7ab4dbcda4b3417f3caa6ad3f0b3d80a79524 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000013- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
14 list.sort().
15
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000016
17Extension Modules
18-----------------
19
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000020- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
21 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
22
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000023- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
24 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
25 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
26
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000027
28Library
29-------
30
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +000031- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
32 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
33 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
34 encoding alias table
35
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +000036- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
37
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000038- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
39 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
40
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +000041- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
42
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +000043- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
44
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +000045- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
46
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +000047- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
48
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +000049- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
50
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +000051- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
52 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
53 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
54
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000055- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000056 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000057
58
59Build
60-----
61
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +000062- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
63 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
64 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
65 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
66 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
67 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
68 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
69 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
70
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000071
72C API
73-----
74
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +000075- Removed PyRange_New().
76
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000077
78Tests
79-----
80
81
82Mac
83---
84
85
86
87Tools/Demos
88-----------
89
90
91
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +000092What's New in Python 2.4 final?
93===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +000094
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +000095*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +000096
97Core and builtins
98-----------------
99
100- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
101 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
102 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
103
104
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000105What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
106==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000107
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000108*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000109
110Core and builtins
111-----------------
112
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000113- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
114 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
115 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
116
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000117
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000118Library
119-------
120
121- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
122 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
123 raised is re-raised.
124
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000125- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
126 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
127
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000128- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
129 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
130 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
131 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
132 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
133 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
134 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
135 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
136 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
137 by the slice are recomputed now.
138
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000139- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000140
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000141Build
142-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000143
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000144- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
145 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
146 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000147
148C API
149-----
150
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000151- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
152
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000153
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000154What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
155================================
156
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000157*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000158
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000159License
160-------
161
162The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
163is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
164changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
165Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
166intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
167durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
168the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
169License::
170
171 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
172
173says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
174to Python 2.1.1.
175
176The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
177License Version 2.
178
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000179Core and builtins
180-----------------
181
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000182- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
183 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
184 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
185 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
186 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
187 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
188 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
189 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
190 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
191 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
192
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000193- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000194
195Extension Modules
196-----------------
197
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000198- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
199 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
200 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
201 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000202
203Library
204-------
205
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000206- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
207 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
208 returned.
209
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000210- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
211
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000212- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
213 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
214
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000215- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
216
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000217- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
218 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000219
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000220- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
221
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000222- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
223
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000224- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000225 the source code is updated and reloaded.
226
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000227Build
228-----
229
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000230- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000231
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000232What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
233================================
234
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000235*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000236
237Core and builtins
238-----------------
239
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000240- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000241 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
242
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000243- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
244 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
245 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
246 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
247
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000248- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
249 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
250
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000251- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
252 constant.
253
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000254- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
255 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
256 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
257 large), and to anomalies such as
258 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
259 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
260 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
261 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000262
263Extension modules
264-----------------
265
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000266- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
267 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000268 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
269 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
270 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000271
272Library
273-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000274
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000275- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000276 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000277 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
278 --swig-cpp.
279
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000280- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
281 it is set.
282
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000283- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000284
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000285- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
286 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
287 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
288 Closes bug #1039270.
289
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000290- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000291
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000292 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000293 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
294 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
295 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
296 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
297 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
298 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
299 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
300 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
301 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
302 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
303 + Updates to documentation.
304
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000305- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
306 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
307 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
308 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
309
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000310- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000311
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000312- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
313 applications should use the getmember function.
314
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000315- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
316
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000317- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
318 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
319 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
320 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
321 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
322 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
323 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
324 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
325 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
326
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000327- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
328 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000329 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000330
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000331- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
332 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
333 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
334 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
335 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
336 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
337 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
338 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000339
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000340- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
341 the new public features (of which there are many).
342
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000343- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000344 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
345 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
346 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
347 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000348 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000349
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000350- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
351
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000352- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
353 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
354 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
355 options.
356
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000357- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
358 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
359 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
360 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
361 conditions under which non-string values work.
362
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000363Build
364-----
365
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000366- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
367 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
368 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
369
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000370- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
371 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
372 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
373 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
374 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000375
376C API
377-----
378
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000379- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
380 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
381
382- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
383
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000384- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
385 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
386 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
387 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
388 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
389 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
390 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
391 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
392 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
393
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000394- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
395
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000396- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
397 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
398 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000399
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000400Tests
401-----
402
403- test__locale ported to unittest
404
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000405Mac
406---
407
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000408- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
409 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
410 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000411
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000412Tools/Demos
413-----------
414
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000415- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
416 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
417 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
418 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
419 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000420
421
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000422What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
423=================================
424
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000425*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000426
427Core and builtins
428-----------------
429
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000430- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000431 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
432
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000433- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
434 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
435 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
436 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
437 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
438 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
439 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
440 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000441 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
442 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
443 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
444 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
445 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000446
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000447- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
448 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
449 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
450 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
451 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
452
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000453- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
454
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000455- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
456 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
457
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000458- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
459 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
460 modified the list.
461
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000462- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
463 functions is now writable.
464
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000465- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
466 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
467 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
468 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
469
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000470- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
471 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
472 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
473 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
474 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000475
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000476- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
477 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
478
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000479Extension modules
480-----------------
481
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000482- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
483
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000484- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
485 data.
486
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000487- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
488 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
489 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
490 supposed to have been truncated away.
491
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000492- Added socket.socketpair().
493
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000494- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
495 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
496
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000497- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000498 versions of Python, have now been removed.
499
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000500Library
501-------
502
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000503- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000504 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000505
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000506- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
507 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
508
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000509- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
510 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
511
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000512- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
513
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000514- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
515 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000516
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000517- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
518 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
519
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000520- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
521
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000522- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
523
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000524- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
525
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000526- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
527 Percivall.
528
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000529- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
530 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
531
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000532- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
533 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
534 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000535 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000536
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000537- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
538 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
539 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
540 and exponent.
541
542- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
543
544- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
545 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
546 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
547
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000548- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
549 to the readline module.
550
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000551- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000552 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
553 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000554
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000555- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
556 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
557 contains symlinks.
558
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000559- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
560 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
561
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000562- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
563 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
564 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
565
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000566- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
567 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
568 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
569 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
570 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
571 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
572 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
573 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
574 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
575 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
576 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
577 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
578 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
579
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000580- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
581
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000582Tools/Demos
583-----------
584
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000585- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
586 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
587
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000588- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
589
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000590Build
591-----
592
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000593- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
594 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
595 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
596 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
597 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
598 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
599 plans to do so.
600
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000601- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
602 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
603
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000604- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
605 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
606
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000607- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
608 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
609
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000610- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
611 GNU/k*BSD systems.
612
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000613- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
614 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
615
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000616C API
617-----
618
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000619..
620
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000621Documentation
622-------------
623
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000624- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
625 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
626
627- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
628 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
629 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000630
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000631New platforms
632-------------
633
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000634- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
635
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000636Tests
637-----
638
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000639..
640
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000641Windows
642-------
643
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000644- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
645 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
646 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
647 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
648 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
649 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
650 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
651 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
652 the problem.
653
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000654Mac
655---
656
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000657..
658
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000659
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000660What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
661=================================
662
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000663*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000664
665Core and builtins
666-----------------
667
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000668- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
669 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
670 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
671 sensitive code.
672
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000673- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000674 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000675
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000676 @staticmethod
677 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000678
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000679 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000680
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000681- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
682 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
683 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
684 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
685 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
686 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
687 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
688 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
689 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
690 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
691 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
692
693 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
694 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
695 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
696 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
697 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
698 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
699 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
700
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000701- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
702 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
703
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000704- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000705 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000706
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000707- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000708 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000709 which was missing for no apparent reason.
710
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000711- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000712 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
713 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
714
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000715- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
716 types that support garbage collection.
717
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000718- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
719
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000720- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
721 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
722 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
723 Jython.
724
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000725- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
726
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000727- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
728 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
729
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000730- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
731 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
732 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000733
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000734- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
735 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
736 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
737
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000738Extension modules
739-----------------
740
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000741- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
742
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000743Library
744-------
745
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000746- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
747 TIS-620
748
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000749- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
750 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
751 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
752 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
753 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
754 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
755 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
756 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
757 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
758 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
759
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000760- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
761
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000762- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
763 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
764 same as when the argument is omitted).
765 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
766
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000767- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
768
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000769- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
770 schemes are offered.
771
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000772- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
773
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000774- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
775 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
776 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
777
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000778- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
779
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000780- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
781 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
782
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000783- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
784 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
785 when dummy_threading is being used.
786
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000787- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
788 from a tarfile.
789
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000790- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000791 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000792
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000793- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
794 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
795 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
796 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
797
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000798- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
799 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
800
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000801- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
802 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
803 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
804 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
805 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
806 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
807 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
808 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
809 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
810 by some other method in progress).
811
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000812- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
813 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
814 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000815
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000816- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
817
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000818- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
819 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
820 AM Kuchling.
821
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000822- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
823 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
824 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
825
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000826- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
827 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
828 instead of unsigned.
829
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000830- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000831 no longer part of the public API.
832
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000833- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
834 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
835 string methods of the same name).
836
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000837- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000838 SF patch 945642.
839
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000840- doctest unittest integration improvements:
841
842 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
843
844 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
845 DocTestSuites.
846
847- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
848 that provide thread-local data.
849
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000850- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
851 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
852
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000853- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
854
855- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
856 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
857 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
858
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000859- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
860
861 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
862 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
863 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000864
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000865 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
866 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
867 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
868 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
869
870 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
871 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
872
873 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
874 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
875 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
876 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
877
878 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
879 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
880 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
881 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
882 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
883
884 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
885 wrapping help output.
886
887 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
888 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
889 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000890
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000891C API
892-----
893
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000894- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
895 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
896 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
897 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
898 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
899 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
900 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
901 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
902 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
903 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
904 its visible semantics have not changed.
905
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000906- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
907 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
908
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000909Documentation
910-------------
911
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000912- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000913
914 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000915 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000916
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000917 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000918
919 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
920
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000921- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000922
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000923Tests
924-----
925
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000926- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000927 platforms that use the Makefile.
928
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000929- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
930 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
931 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
932
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000933
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000934What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
935=================================
936
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000937*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000938
939Core and builtins
940-----------------
941
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000942- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
943 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
944 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
945 objects now (one object instead of three).
946
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000947- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
948 Windows DLLs.
949
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000950- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
951 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000952
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000953- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
954 a new .pyc magic.
955
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000956- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
957 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
958 be there.
959
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000960- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
961 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
962 the LC_NUMERIC category.
963
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000964- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
965 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
966 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
967
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000968- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
969
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000970- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
971 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
972 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000973
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000974- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
975 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
976
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000977- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
978
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000979- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000980 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000981
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000982- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
983
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000984- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
985
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000986- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
987 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
988
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000989- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
990 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
991 Fixes bug #858016 .
992
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000993- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
994 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
995 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
996
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000997- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
998 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
999 improves their performance (about 35%).
1000
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001001- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1002 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1003 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1004
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001005- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1006 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1007 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1008 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1009
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001010- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1011 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1012 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1013 length is not known).
1014
1015- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1016 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001017 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1018 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001019 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1020
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001021- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1022 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1023
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001024- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1025 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1026 keyword arguments.
1027
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001028- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1029 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1030 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1031
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001032- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1033 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1034 cases.
1035
1036- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1037 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1038 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1039 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1040 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1041 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1042 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1043 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1044 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1045 a release build.
1046
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001047- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1048 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1049
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001050- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001051 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001052
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001053- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1054 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1055 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1056 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1057 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1058 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1059 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1060 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1061 destroyed.
1062
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001063- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1064 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1065 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1066 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1067 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1068 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1069 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1070 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1071
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001072- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1073 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1074 character other than a space.
1075
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001076- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1077 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1078 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1079 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1080 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1081 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1082 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1083 attributes with the same name.
1084
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001085- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1086 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1087 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1088 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1089 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1090 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1091 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1092 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1093 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1094 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1095 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1096 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1097 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1098 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001099
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001100- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1101 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1102 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1103 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1104 This has been repaired.
1105
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001106- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1107
1108- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1109
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001110- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1111 over a sequence.
1112
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001113- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001114 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001115
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001116- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1117
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001118- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1119 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1120 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1121 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1122 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1123 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1124 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1125 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1126
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001127- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1128 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1129 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1130
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001131- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1132 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1133 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1134 freelist.
1135
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001136- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1137 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1138
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001139- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1140 number.
1141
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001142- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1143 a TypeError exception.
1144
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001145- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1146 820195.
1147
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001148- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1149 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1150 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1151
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001152- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001153 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1154 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001155
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001156- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1157 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1158 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1159
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001160- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1161 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001162 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001163
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001164- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001165 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1166 the first call.
1167
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001168
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001169Extension modules
1170-----------------
1171
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001172- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1173 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1174
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001175- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1176 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1177 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1178 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1179 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1180 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1181 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001182
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001183- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1184
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001185- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1186
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001187- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1188 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1189
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001190- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1191 fewer false positives.
1192
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001193- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1194 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1195
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001196- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001197 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1198
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001199- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001200 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001201 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001202 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1203 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001204
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001205- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1206 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1207 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1208 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1209
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001210- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1211 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1212 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1213 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1214 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1215 #897625.
1216
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001217- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1218 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1219
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001220- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1221 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1222 and pops on either side of the deque.
1223
1224- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1225 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1226
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001227- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1228 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1229 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1230 other functions that expect a function argument.
1231
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001232- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1233
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001234- os.getsid was added.
1235
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001236- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1237 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1238 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1239
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001240- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1241
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001242- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1243
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001244- readline.clear_history was added.
1245
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001246- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1247
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001248- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1249
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001250- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1251
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001252- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1253
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001254- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1255
1256- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1257
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001258- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1259
1260- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1261
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001262- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1263 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1264 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1265
1266- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1267 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1268 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1269 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1270 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1271 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1272 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1273
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001274- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1275 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1276 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1277 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001278
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001279- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001280 iterators from a single iterable.
1281
1282- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1283 of raising a TypeError exception.
1284
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001285- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1286 as parameter.
1287
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001288Library
1289-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001290
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001291- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1292 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1293 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001294
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001295- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1296 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1297 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001298
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001299- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001300
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001301- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1302 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001303
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001304- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1305 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1306
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001307- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1308
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001309- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001310 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001311
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001312- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001313 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001314
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001315- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1316
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001317- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1318 on cygwin and mingw32.
1319
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001320- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1321
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001322- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1323 module.
1324
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001325- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1326 installation scheme for all platforms.
1327
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001328- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001329 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001330
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001331- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1332 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1333 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1334
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001335- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1336 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1337 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1338
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001339- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1340
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001341- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1342
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001343- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1344 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1345
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001346- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1347 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1348 type pattern with the same value exists.
1349
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001350- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1351 when run from the command prompt).
1352
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001353- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1354 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1355
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001356- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1357 default sort).
1358
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001359- Added global runctx function to profile module
1360
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001361- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1362
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001363- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1364
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001365- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1366
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001367- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001368 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1369 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1370 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1371 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1372 accordingly.
1373
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001374- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1375 decoding standards.
1376
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001377- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1378 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1379 called for all requests.
1380
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001381- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1382 they are passed to the compiler.
1383
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001384- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1385 indent, width and depth.
1386
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001387- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1388 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1389
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001390- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1391 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1392
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001393- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1394
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001395- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1396
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001397- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1398
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001399- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1400 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1401
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001402- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001403 for better performance.
1404
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001405- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001406
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001407- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1408 a string).
1409
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001410- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1411
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001412- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1413
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001414- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1415
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001416- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1417
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001418- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1419 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1420 list of fieldnames.
1421
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001422- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1423 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1424
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001425- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1426
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001427- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1428 empty lists.
1429
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001430- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1431 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1432 and shelves.
1433
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001434- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1435 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1436
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001437- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001438 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1439 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001440
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001441- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1442 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001443 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001444
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001445- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001446 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1447 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1448
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001449- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1450 and removed in Py2.4.
1451
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001452- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1453
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001454- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1455
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001456Tools/Demos
1457-----------
1458
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001459- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1460 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1461
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001462- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1463
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001464- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1465 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1466 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1467 destination in situations where both files are given.
1468
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001469- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1470 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1471 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1472 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1473
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001474- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1475
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001476- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1477 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1478 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1479 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1480 now.
1481
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001482- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1483 in effect
1484
1485- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1486 C-c C-h
1487
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001488- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1489 -d option was given.
1490
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001491Build
1492-----
1493
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001494- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1495 build under OS X.
1496
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001497- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1498 --enable-profiling.
1499
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001500- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1501 is configured --with-tsc.
1502
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001503- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1504 on AMD64.
1505
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001506- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1507 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1508
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001509- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1510 removed.
1511
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001512- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1513 supported (see PEP 11).
1514
1515- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1516
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001517- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1518
1519- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1520 (see PEP 11).
1521
1522- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1523 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1524
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001525C API
1526-----
1527
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001528- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1529 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1530 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1531
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001532- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1533 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1534 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1535 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1536
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001537- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1538 generator objects.
1539
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001540- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1541 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001542 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1543 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001544
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001545- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1546 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1547
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001548- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1549 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1550 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1551 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1552 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1553
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001554- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1555 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1556 about 10% faster.
1557
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001558- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1559 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1560
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001561- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1562 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1563 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1564 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1565
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001566Windows
1567-------
1568
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001569- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1570 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1571 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1572 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1573
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001574- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1575 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1576 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1577
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001578
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001579What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1580===============================
1581
1582*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1583
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001584IDLE
1585----
1586
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001587- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1588 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1589 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1590 context-menu actions.
1591
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001592- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1593 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1594 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1595 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1596 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1597 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1598 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1599 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1600 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1601
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001602
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001603What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1604=============================================
1605
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001606*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001607
1608Core and builtins
1609-----------------
1610
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001611- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001612 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001613 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1614
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001615Extension modules
1616-----------------
1617
1618- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1619 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1620 than once. This has been fixed.
1621
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001622- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1623 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1624 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1625 call.
1626
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001627- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1628
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001629Library
1630-------
1631
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001632- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1633 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1634
1635- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1636 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1637 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1638 restored.
1639
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001640IDLE
1641----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001642
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001643- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001644
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001645Build
1646-----
1647
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001648- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1649 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1650
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001651C API
1652-----
1653
1654Windows
1655-------
1656
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001657- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1658 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1659
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001660- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1661
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001662Mac
1663---
1664
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001665- Various fixes to pimp.
1666
1667- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1668
1669- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1670 more problems than it solves.
1671
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001672
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001673What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1674=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001675
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001676*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1677
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001678Core and builtins
1679-----------------
1680
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001681- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1682 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1683
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001684- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1685 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001686 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001687
1688- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1689 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1690 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001691 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001692
1693- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1694 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001695
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001696- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1697 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1698 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1699
1700- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001701 770247.
1702
1703- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001704
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001705Extension modules
1706-----------------
1707
1708- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1709 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1710
1711- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1712
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001713- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1714
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001715- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1716 contained within the _strptime module.
1717
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001718- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1719 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1720
1721- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001722 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1723
1724- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1725 the find_class attribute, if present.
1726
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001727- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001728
1729 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1730 (SF bug 763298).
1731
1732 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001733 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1734 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1735 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001736
1737 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1738
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001739Library
1740-------
1741
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001742- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1743
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001744- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1745 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1746 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1747 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1748 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1749 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1750 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1751 or Tester().
1752
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001753- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1754 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1755 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1756 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1757 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1758 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1759 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1760 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1761 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001762
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001763 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001764
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001765- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1766 weren't before was an oversight.
1767
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001768- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1769 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1770
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001771- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1772 when there are no lines.
1773
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001774- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1775 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1776
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001777- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1778 to child processes.
1779
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001780- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1781
1782- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1783
1784- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1785 xmlrpclib.
1786
1787- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1788 responses.
1789
1790- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1791 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1792
1793- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1794 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1795 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1796
1797- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1798 used as patterns.
1799
1800- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1801 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1802 than Tk 8.3.
1803
1804- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1805
1806- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001807
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001808Tools/Demos
1809-----------
1810
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001811- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1812
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001813- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1814
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001815- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001816
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001817Build
1818-----
1819
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001820- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1821
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001822- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1823
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001824- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1825 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001826
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001827- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1828 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1829 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001830
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001831C API
1832-----
1833
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001834- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1835 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1836
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001837Windows
1838-------
1839
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001840- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1841 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1842 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1843 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1844 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1845 Python exception ::
1846
1847 thread.error: can't start new thread
1848
1849 is raised now.
1850
1851- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1852 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1853 instead of from DLL teardown.
1854
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001855Mac
1856---
1857
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001858- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001859 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001860 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1861 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1862 the executable in the bundle.
1863
1864- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001865
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001866- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1867
1868- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1869 on Panther.
1870
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001871What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1872================================
1873
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001874*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001875
1876Core and builtins
1877-----------------
1878
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001879- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1880 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1881 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1882 with the -i option.
1883
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001884- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1885 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1886
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001887- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1888 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1889
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001890- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1891 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1892 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1893 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1894 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1895 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1896 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1897 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1898 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1899 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1900 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1901 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1902 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001903
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001904- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1905 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1906 embedded in a lambda expression.
1907
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001908- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1909 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1910 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1911 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1912 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1913
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001914- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1915 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1916 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1917
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001918- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1919 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1920
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001921- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1922 It's writable again.
1923
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001924- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1925 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1926 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001927 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001928
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001929- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1930 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1931 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1932
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001933Extension modules
1934-----------------
1935
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001936- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1937 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1938
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001939- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1940 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1941 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1942 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1943
1944- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1945 collection.
1946
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001947- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1948 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1949 unique within a single program run.
1950
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001951- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1952 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1953
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001954- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1955 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1956
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001957- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1958 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001959
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001960- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1961
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001962- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1963 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1964
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001965- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1966 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1967 for many BSD-derived systems.
1968
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001969
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001970Library
1971-------
1972
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001973- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1974 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1975 primary ones:
1976
1977 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1978 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1979 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1980
1981 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1982 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1983 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1984 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1985 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1986 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1987
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001988- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1989 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1990 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1991 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1992 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1993 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1994 argument.
1995
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001996- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1997 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1998 in the archive.
1999
2000- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2001 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2002
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002003- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2004 569574).
2005
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002006- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2007 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2008 no more.
2009
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002010- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2011 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2012 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2013 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2014 code coverage.
2015
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002016- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2017 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2018 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002019 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2020 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002021
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002022- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2023 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2024 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002025 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002026
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002027- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2028
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002029- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2030 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2031 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2032 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2033
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002034- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2035 handling.
2036
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002037- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2038 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2039
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002040- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2041 in socket.py.
2042
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002043- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2044
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002045- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2046 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2047 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2048 opener with proxy support.
2049
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002050- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2051
2052- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2053
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002054Tools/Demos
2055-----------
2056
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002057- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2058
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002059- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2060
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002061- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2062 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002063
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002064- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2065 files.
2066
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002067Build
2068-----
2069
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002070- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002071 different root directory.
2072
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002073C API
2074-----
2075
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002076- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2077 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2078 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2079 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2080 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2081 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2082 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2083 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2084 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2085 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2086
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002087- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2088 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2089 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2090 from Python.
2091
2092
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002093New platforms
2094-------------
2095
2096None this time.
2097
2098Tests
2099-----
2100
2101- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2102 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2103
2104Windows
2105-------
2106
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002107- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2108
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002109- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2110 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2111 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2112 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2113 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2114 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2115 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2116 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2117 that's what it's for.
2118
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002119Mac
2120---
2121
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002122- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2123 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2124 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2125 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002126- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2127 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2128- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002129
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002130SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2131------------------------------------
2132
2133430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2134598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2135622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2136661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2137683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2138697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2139713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2140724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2141727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2142729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2143730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2144731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2145732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2146733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2147735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2148740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2149744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2150745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2151747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2152749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2153751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2154753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2155755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2156757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2157760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2158
2159
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002160What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2161================================
2162
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002163*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002164
2165Core and builtins
2166-----------------
2167
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002168- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2169 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2170
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002171- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2172 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2173 and cannot be strings).
2174
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002175- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2176 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2177 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2178 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2179
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002180- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2181 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2182 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2183 Python itself.
2184
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002185- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2186 the referenced object, if it has one.
2187
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002188- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2189 the thread started at
2190 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2191
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002192- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2193 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2194 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2195 placed on a list index.
2196
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002197- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2198 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2199 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2200 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2201
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002202- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2203 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2204 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2205 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2206 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2207 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2208 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2209
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002210- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2211 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2212 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2213 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2214 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2215
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002216- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2217 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002218
2219- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2220 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2221 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2222 #693195.)
2223
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002224- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2225 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002226
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002227- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002228 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002229 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2230 interpreter executions, would fail.
2231
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002232- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002233 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002234 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002235
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002236Extension modules
2237-----------------
2238
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002239- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2240 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2241 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2242 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2243
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002244- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2245 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2246
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002247- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2248 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2249 and Greg Chapman.)
2250
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002251- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2252 recursively.
2253
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002254- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002255 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2256 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2257 leaks.
2258
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002259- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2260
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002261- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2262 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2263 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2264 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2265 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2266 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2267 #705836.
2268
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002269- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002270 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2271
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002272- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2273 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2274 See SF bug #692416.
2275
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002276- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2277 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2278
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002279- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2280 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2281 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002282
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002283- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002284 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2285 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2286
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002287- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2288 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2289 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2290 timeouts to work properly.
2291
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002292Library
2293-------
2294
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002295- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2296 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2297 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2298 future release.
2299
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002300- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2301 for querying platform dependent features.
2302
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002303- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002304
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002305- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2306 pickle protocol versions.
2307
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002308- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2309 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2310 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2311
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002312- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2313
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002314- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2315 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2316 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2317 modules.
2318
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002319- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2320 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2321 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2322
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002323- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2324 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2325
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002326- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2327 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2328 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2329
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002330- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002331 MS Office extensions.
2332
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002333- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2334 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2335
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002336- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2337 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2338
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002339- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2340 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2341 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2342 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2343 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2344 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2345
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002346- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2347 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2348 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002349
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002350- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2351 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2352 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2353
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002354- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2355
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002356- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2357 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2358 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2359
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002360Tools/Demos
2361-----------
2362
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002363- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2364 See the module docstring for details.
2365
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002366Build
2367-----
2368
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002369- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2370 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002371
2372C API
2373-----
2374
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002375- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2376
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002377- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2378 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2379 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2380
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002381- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2382 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002383
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002384 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2385 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2386 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002387
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002388- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002389 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2390
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002391- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2392 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2393 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002394
2395New platforms
2396-------------
2397
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002398None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002399
2400Tests
2401-----
2402
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002403- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2404 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002405
2406Windows
2407-------
2408
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002409- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2410 function.
2411
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002412- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2413 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002414
2415Mac
2416---
2417
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002418- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2419 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002420
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002421- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2422 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002423
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002424- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2425 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2426 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002427
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002428- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002429 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2430 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002431
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002432- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2433 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002434
2435
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002436What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2437=================================
2438
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002439*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002440
2441Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002442-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002443
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002444- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2445 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2446 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2447
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002448- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2449 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2450 (SF patch #664376.)
2451
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002452- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2453 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2454 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2455 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2456 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2457 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002458 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002459
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002460- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2461 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2462 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2463 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002464 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002465
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002466- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2467 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2468 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2469 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2470 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2471 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2472 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2473 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2474 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2475 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2476 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2477
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002478- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2479 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2480 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2481 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2482 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2483 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2484
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002485- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2486 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2487
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002488- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2489 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2490 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2491 case.)
2492
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002493- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2494 passed as unicode strings.
2495
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002496- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2497 See SF bug #683467.
2498
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002499- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2500 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2501
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002502- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2503
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002504- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2505
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002506- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2507 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2508 arguments.
2509
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002510- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2511 See SF bug #667147.
2512
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002513- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002514 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002515 See SF bug #676155.
2516
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002517- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002518 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002519 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2520 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2521 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2522 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2523 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2524 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002525
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002526Extension modules
2527-----------------
2528
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002529- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2530 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2531 tp_as_number pointer.
2532
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002533- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2534 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2535 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2536 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2537 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2538
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002539- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2540
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002541- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2542
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002543- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002544 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002545 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2546 patch #678531.)
2547
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002548- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2549 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2550
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002551- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2552 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2553
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002554- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2555
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002556- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2557 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2558 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2559
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002560- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2561
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002562- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2563 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2564
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002565- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002566
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002567- datetime changes:
2568
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002569 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2570
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002571 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2572 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2573 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2574 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2575 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2576 now.
2577
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002578 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002579 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2580 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002581
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002582 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002583 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002584 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2585 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2586 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2587 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002588
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002589 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2590 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2591 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002592 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2593
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002594 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2595 by a later example coded by Guido.
2596
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002597 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002598 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2599 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2600 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002601 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2602 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2603
2604 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2605 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2606 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2607 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2608 tzinfo subclass instance.
2609
2610 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2611 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2612 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2613 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2614 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2615 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2616 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2617 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002618
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002619 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2620 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2621 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2622 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2623 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002624 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2625
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002626 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002627
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002628 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2629 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2630 as a naive datetime object.
2631
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002632 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2633 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2634 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2635
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002636 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2637 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2638 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2639 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2640 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2641 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2642 comparison.
2643
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002644 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2645 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2646 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2647 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002648 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002649
2650 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002651
2652 and ::
2653
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002654 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2655
2656 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2657 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2658 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2659 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2660
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002661 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2662 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2663 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2664 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2665 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2666
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002667 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2668 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002669 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2670 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002671
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002672Library
2673-------
2674
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002675- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2676 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2677
2678- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2679 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2680 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2681 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2682 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2683 See PEP 307 for details.
2684
2685- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2686 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2687
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002688- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2689 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002690 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002691 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2692 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002693 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002694
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002695- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2696 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2697
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002698- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2699 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2700 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2701
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002702- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2703
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002704- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2705 exception.
2706
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002707- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2708 class.
2709
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002710- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2711 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2712 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2713
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002714- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2715 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2716
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002717- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002718 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2719 See SF bug #659228.
2720
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002721- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2722 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2723 See SF patch #651082.
2724
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002725- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002726
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002727- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2728 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2729
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002730- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002731 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002732
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002733- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2734 DOS paths from other platforms.
2735
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002736Tools/Demos
2737-----------
2738
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002739- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2740 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2741 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2742 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2743 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2744 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2745 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2746 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2747 example:
2748
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002749 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2750 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002751
2752 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2753
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002754
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002755Build
2756-----
2757
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002758- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2759 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2760 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002761 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2762
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002763 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2764
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002765- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2766 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2767 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2768 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2769 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2770 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2771 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2772 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2773 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2774
2775- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2776 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2777 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2778 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2779
2780- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2781 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2782
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002783C API
2784-----
2785
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002786- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2787 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002788
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002789- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2790 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2791 tp_as_number pointer.
2792
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002793- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2794 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2795 (SF #681367)
2796
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002797- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2798 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2799 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2800 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002801
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002802Tests
2803-----
2804
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002805- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002806 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2807 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2808 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2809 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2810 pydoc.)
2811
2812- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2813
2814- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002815
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002816Windows
2817-------
2818
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002819- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2820 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2821 time).
2822
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002823- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2824 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2825
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002826- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2827 release without strong cryptography.
2828
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002829- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002830 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002831
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002832- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2833 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2834
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002835Mac
2836---
2837
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002838- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2839 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002840
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002841- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2842 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2843 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002844
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002845- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2846 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002847
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002848- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2849 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2850 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2851 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002852
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002853- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002854 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2855 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2856 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002857
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002858
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002859What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002860=================================
2861
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002862*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002863
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002864Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002865--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002866
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002867- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2868
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002869- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2870 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002871 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002872 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002873 a different meaning than before.
2874
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002875- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002876 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002877 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002878
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002879- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002880 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002881 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002882
2883- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2884 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2885 and deallocation.
2886
2887- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2888 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2889
2890- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2891 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2892 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2893 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2894 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2895
2896- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2897 now detected by the garbage collector.
2898
2899- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2900 [SF bug 519621]
2901
2902- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2903 identifier.
2904
2905- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2906 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2907 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2908 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2909 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2910 [SF bug 563060]
2911
2912- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2913 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2914 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2915 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2916 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2917
2918- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2919 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2920 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2921
2922- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2923
2924- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2925 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2926 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2927 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2928 state of the slots would be lost.)
2929
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002930Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002931-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002932
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002933- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002934 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2935 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2936 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2937 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002938 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2939 Jython 2.1.
2940
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002941- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002942 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002943 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2944 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2945 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2946 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2947 these, see PEP 302.
2948
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002949- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2950 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2951 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2952
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002953- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2954 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2955 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2956
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002957- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2958 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2959 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2960
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002961- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2962 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2963 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2964 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2965 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2966 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2967 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2968 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2969 releases or implementations.
2970
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002971- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002972 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2973 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002974
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002975- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2976 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2977
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002978- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2979 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2980 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2981
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002982- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2983 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2984
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002985- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2986 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002987 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2988 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002989
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002990- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2991 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2992 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2993 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2994 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2995
2996 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2997 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2998 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2999 pattern.
3000
3001 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3002 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3003 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3004 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3005
3006 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3007 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3008 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3009 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3010 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3011 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3012
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003013- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3014 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3015 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3016 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3017 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3018 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3019 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3020 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003021
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003022- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3023 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3024 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3025 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3026 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003027 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3028 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3029 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3030 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3031 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3032 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3033 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003034
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003035- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3036 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3037
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003038- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3039 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3040 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3041 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3042 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3043 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3044 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3045 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3046 to Zack Weinberg!
3047
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003048- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3049 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3050 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3051 type. This has been fixed now.
3052
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003053- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3054 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3055 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3056
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003057- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3058 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3059 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3060 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3061 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3062 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3063 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3064 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003065 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003066
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003067- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3068 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3069 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003070
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003071- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3072 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3073 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3074 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3075 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3076 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3077 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3078 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003079 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003080 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3081 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3082
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003083- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3084 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3085 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3086 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3087 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3088 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3089 this.)
3090
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003091- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3092 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003093 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003094 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003095 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3096 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003097 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3098 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003099
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003100- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3101 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3102 currently running.
3103
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003104- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3105 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3106 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3107 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3108
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003109- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3110 as directory names.
3111
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003112- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3113 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3114
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003115- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3116 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3117
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003118- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003119 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3120 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003121
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003122- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3123 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3124 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3125 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3126 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3127
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003128- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3129 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3130 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3131 removed.
3132
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003133- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3134 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3135 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3136
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003137- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3138 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3139 to __debug__.
3140
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003141- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3142 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3143 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3144
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003145- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3146 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3147 deprecated now.
3148
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003149- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3150 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3151 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003152
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003153- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3154 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3155 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3156 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3157 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003158
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003159- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3160 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3161
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003162- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3163 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3164 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003165 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003166 is backward compatible.
3167
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003168- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3169 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3170 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3171 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3172 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3173
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003174- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3175 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3176 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3177 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3178 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3179 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003180
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003181- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3182 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3183
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003184- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3185 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3186
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003187- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3188 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3189 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3190 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3191 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3192
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003193- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3194 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3195 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3196
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003197- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003198 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3199
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003200- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3201 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3202 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003203
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003204- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3205 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3206
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003207- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3208 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3209 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3210
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003211- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3212
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003213Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003214-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003215
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003216- Added three operators to the operator module:
3217 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3218 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3219 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3220
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003221- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3222
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003223- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3224 archives.
3225
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003226- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3227 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3228 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3229
3230 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3231
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003232- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3233 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3234 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003235 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003236
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003237- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3238 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3239 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3240 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003241 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3242 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3243 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3244 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003245
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003246- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3247 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003248
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003249- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3250
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003251- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3252 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3253
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003254- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3255 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3256 supported.
3257
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003258- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3259
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003260- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3261 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003262
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003263- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3264 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3265
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003266- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3267
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003268- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3269 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3270
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003271- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3272 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3273 functions but callable type objects.
3274
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003275- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003276 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003277 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003278
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003279- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3280 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003281
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003282- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3283 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003284
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003285- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3286 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3287 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3288 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3289
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003290- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3291 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003292
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003293- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3294 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3295 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3296 and __imul__.
3297
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003298- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003299 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3300 is called.
3301
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003302- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3303 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3304 interpreter was compiled.
3305
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003306- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3307 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3308 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003309 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003310 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3311 1, not 2.
3312
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003313- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3314 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3315 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3316 limit.
3317
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003318- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3319 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3320 bug #623464.
3321
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003322- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3323 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3324 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3325 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3326
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003327Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003328-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003329
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003330- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3331
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003332- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3333 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3334 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3335 with Python 2.3a2.
3336
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003337- os.path exposes getctime.
3338
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003339- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003340 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003341 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003342 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003343 unit tests of floating point results.
3344
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003345- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3346 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3347 has been increased.
3348
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003349- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3350 executed.
3351
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003352- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3353 postinstallation script.
3354
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003355- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3356 test the current module.
3357
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003358- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003359 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3360 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3361 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3362 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3363
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003364- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003365 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003366 Ward's Optik package.
3367
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003368- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3369 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3370 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3371 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3372
3373- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3374 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003375 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003376
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003377- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3378 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3379 shelf are binary pickles.
3380
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003381- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3382 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3383
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003384- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3385 modules are iterators now.
3386
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003387- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3388 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3389 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3390 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3391 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3392 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003393
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003394- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3395 with their entity value.
3396
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003397- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3398
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003399- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3400 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003401
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003402- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3403 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003404 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003405
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003406- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3407 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3408 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3409 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3410 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3411 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3412 main():
3413
3414 import locale
3415 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3416
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003417- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3418 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3419
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003420- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3421 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3422 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3423 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3424 to the new standard.
3425
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003426- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3427 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3428 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3429 an extension to the database.
3430
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003431- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3432 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3433 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3434 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003435 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003436
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003437- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003438 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003439
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003440- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3441 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3442 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3443 bounded integers.
3444
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003445- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3446 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3447 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3448 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3449 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3450 in existence.
3451
3452 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3453 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3454 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3455 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3456 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3457 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3458
3459 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3460 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3461 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3462 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3463
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003464- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3465 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3466 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3467
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003468- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3469
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003470- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3471 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3472 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3473 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3474
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003475- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3476 argument.
3477
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003478- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3479 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3480 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3481 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3482 [SF patch 560794].
3483
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003484- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3485 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3486 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003487 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3488 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3489 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003490
3491- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3492 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003493
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003494- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3495 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3496 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3497 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003498
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003499- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3500 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3501 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3502 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3503 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3504
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003505- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003506
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003507- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3508
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003509- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3510 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3511 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3512 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3513 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3514 identical to None.
3515
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003516- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3517 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3518 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3519 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3520 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3521 results now.
3522
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003523- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3524 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3525
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003526- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3527 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3528 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3529 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3530 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3531 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3532 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3533 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3534
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003535- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3536
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003537- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3538 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3539
3540- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3541 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3542 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3543 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3544 and other systems.
3545
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003546- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3547 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3548 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3549 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 +00003550 work well with these.
3551
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003552- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3553
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003554- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003555 connections.
3556
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003557- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3558 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3559 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3560
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003561- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3562 sets
3563
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003564- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3565 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3566 name.
3567
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003568- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3569 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3570 passed in.
3571
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003572- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003573 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003574 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3575 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003576
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003577- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3578
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003579- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3580
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003581- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3582 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3583 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3584
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003585- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3586 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3587 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3588 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003589 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003590
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003591- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003592 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003593 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003594
3595- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3596 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3597 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3598
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003599- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003600 the value of its expression argument.
3601
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003602- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3603 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3604 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3605
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003606- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3607 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3608 skipstone browser was included.
3609
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003610- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3611 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3612
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003613Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003614-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003615
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003616- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3617 names in addition to accepting file names.
3618
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003619- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3620 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3621 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3622 still used and useful.)
3623
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003624- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3625 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3626 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3627 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003628
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003629- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3630 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3631 the generated binary.
3632
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003633Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003634-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003635
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003636- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3637
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003638- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3639 except in the hands of experts.
3640
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003641- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003642 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3643 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3644 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003645
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003646- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3647 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3648 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3649 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3650 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3651 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3652 builds.
3653
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003654- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3655 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3656 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3657 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3658 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3659 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3660 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3661 new type.
3662
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003663- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003664
3665 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3666 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3667 positive infinities.
3668
3669 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3670 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3671 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3672 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3673 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3674 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3675 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3676
3677 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3678
3679 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3680
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003681- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3682 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3683 size of the executable.
3684
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003685- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3686 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3687 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3688 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003689
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003690- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3691
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003692- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3693 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3694 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003695
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003696- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3697 well as Unix.
3698
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003699- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3700 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3701 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3702 modules in the README file for details.
3703
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003704C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003705-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003706
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003707- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3708 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003709 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003710 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003711 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003712
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003713- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3714 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3715 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3716 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3717 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3718 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003719 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003720 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3721 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3722 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3723 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3724 aligned.)
3725
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003726- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3727 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3728 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3729
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003730- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3731 level.
3732
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003733- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3734 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3735 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3736 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3737 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3738
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003739- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3740 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3741 code.
3742
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003743- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3744 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3745 adjusting for negative indices.
3746
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003747- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3748 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3749 object.
3750
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003751- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3752 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3753 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3754
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003755- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3756 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003757
3758- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3759
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003760- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3761 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3762 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3763 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3764
3765- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3766
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003767- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003768
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003769- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003770 without going through the buffer API.
3771
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003772- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003773
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003774- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3775 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3776 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3777 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3778
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003779- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3780 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3781
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003782- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003783 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3784
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003785New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003786-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003787
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003788- OpenVMS is now supported.
3789
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003790- AtheOS is now supported.
3791
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003792- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3793
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003794- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3795
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003796Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003797-----
3798
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003799- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3800 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3801 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003802
3803Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003804-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003805
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003806- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3807 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3808 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3809 bugs.
3810 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003811 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003812 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3813 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003814 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003815
3816- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003817 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003818
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003819- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3820 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3821
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003822- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3823 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003824 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003825 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3826
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003827- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3828 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3829 use files" uninstall option).
3830
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003831- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3832
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003833- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3834 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3835
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003836- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3837 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3838 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3839
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003840- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3841 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3842 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3843 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3844 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003845 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3846 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3847 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003848
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003849- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003850 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003851 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3852 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3853 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3854 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3855 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3856 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3857 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3858 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3859 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3860 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3861 work around.
3862
3863- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3864 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3865 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3866 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3867 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3868 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3869 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3870 specified with O_CREAT too).
3871
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003872Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003873----
3874
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003875- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003876
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003877- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3878 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3879 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3880
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003881- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3882 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3883 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3884
3885- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3886 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3887 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3888 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3889 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3890 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3891 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3892 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003893
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003894- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3895 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3896 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003897
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003898- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3899 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3900 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3901 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3902 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003903
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003904- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3905 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3906 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003907
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003908- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3909 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003910
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003911- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3912 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3913 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3914 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3915 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003916
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003917- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3918 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3919 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3920
3921- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3922 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3923 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003924
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003925- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3926 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3927 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3928 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003929 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003930
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003931- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3932 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003933
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003934- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3935 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003936
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003937- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003938 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003939 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3940 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003941
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003942
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003943What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003944===============================
3945
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003946*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3947
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003948Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003949--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003950
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003951- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3952 with a custom metaclass.
3953
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003954Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003955-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003956
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003957- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3958 are proxies.
3959
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003960Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003961-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003962
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003963- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3964 very short strings.
3965
3966- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3967 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3968 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3969 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3970 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3971
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003972Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003973-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003974
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003975- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3976 close or delete time).
3977
3978- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3979 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3980
3981- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3982
3983- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003984 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003985
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003986Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003987-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003988
3989Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003990-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003991
3992C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003993-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003994
3995New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003996-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003997
3998Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003999-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004000
4001Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004002-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004003
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004004- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4005
4006- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4007 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4008
4009- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4010 deleted at process exit time.
4011
4012- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4013 in backslash.
4014
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004015Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004016----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004017
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004018- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4019 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4020 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4021
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004022
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004023What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004024===========================
4025
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004026*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4027
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004028Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004029--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004030
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004031- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4032 been extensively updated. See
4033
4034 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4035
4036 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4037
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004038- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4039 deleted!
4040
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004041- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4042 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4043 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4044 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4045 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4046
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004047- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4048
4049 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4050 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4051
4052 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4053 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4054 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4055 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4056 supported anyway.
4057
4058 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4059 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4060
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004061- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4062 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4063 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4064 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4065 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004066
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004067- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4068 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4069 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4070
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004071Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004072-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004073
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004074- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4075 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4076 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4077 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4078 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4079 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004080 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4081 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4082 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4083 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004084
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004085- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4086 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4087 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4088
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004089Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004090-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004091
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004092- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4093
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004094Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004095-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004096
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004097- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4098 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4099 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4100 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4101 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4102 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4103
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004104- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4105
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004106- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4107
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004108- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4109
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004110- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4111 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4112 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4113
4114- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4115
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004116Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004117-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004118
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004119- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4120 off a search on Google.
4121
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004122Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004123-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004124
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004125- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4126 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4127 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4128 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4129 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4130 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4131 other platforms should do likewise.
4132
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004133- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4134 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4135 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4136
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004137C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004138-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004139
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004140- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4141 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4142 producing key-value pairs.
4143
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004144- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004145 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004146 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4147 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4148 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4149 previously went unchallenged.
4150
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004151New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004152-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004153
4154Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004155-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004156
4157Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004158-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004159
4160Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004161----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004162
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004163- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4164 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004165
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004166- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4167 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4168 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4169 home.
4170
4171
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004172What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004173===========================
4174
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004175*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4176
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004177Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004178--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004179
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004180- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4181 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004182
4183 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004184 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004185
4186 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4187 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004188 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004189 This needs to be documented.
4190
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004191- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4192 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4193
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004194- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4195 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4196 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4197
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004198- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4199 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4200
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004201- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4202 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4203 class forbids it).
4204
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004205- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4206 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4207 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4208
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004209- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4210
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004211Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004212-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004213
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004214- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4215 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004216 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004217
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004218- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4219 (like 1 + '').
4220
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004221Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004222-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004223
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004224- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4225 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4226 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4227 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004228 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004229 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4230
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004231- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4232 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4233 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4234 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4235
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004236- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4237 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004238 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4239 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4240 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004241
4242- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4243 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004244
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004245- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4246 bytes on its input.
4247
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004248Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004249-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004250
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004251- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004252 convenience function.
4253
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004254- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4255 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4256 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004257 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4258 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4259 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4260 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4261 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4262 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004263
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004264- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4265 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4266 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4267 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4268
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004269- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4270 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4271 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4272
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004273- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4274 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4275 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4276 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4277
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004278- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4279 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004280 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004281 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4282 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4283 new -l and -e options.
4284
4285- statcache is now deprecated.
4286
4287- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4288 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004289 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004290 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4291 time properly taken into account.
4292
4293- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4294 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4295 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4296 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4297
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004298Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004299-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004300
4301Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004302-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004303
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004304- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4305 is built with libdb3 if available.
4306
4307- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4308
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004309C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004310-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004311
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004312- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4313 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4314 PySequence_Size().
4315
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004316- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4317
4318- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4319 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4320 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4321
4322- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4323 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4324
4325- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4326 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4327
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004328New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004329-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004330
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004331- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4332 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4333
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004334- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4335 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4336
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004337- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4338
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004339Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004340-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004341
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004342- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4343 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4344
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004345Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004346-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004347
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004348Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004349----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004350
4351- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4352 removed completely in the next release.
4353
4354- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4355 OSX.
4356
4357- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4358 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4359
4360- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4361
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004362
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004363What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004364===========================
4365
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004366*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4367
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004368Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004369--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004370
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004371- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004372 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004373 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004374 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4375 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004376 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4377 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004378 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4379 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004380
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004381- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4382 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4383
4384- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4385 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4386
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004387Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004388-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004389
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004390- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4391 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4392 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4393 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4394 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4395 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4396 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4397 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4398
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004399- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4400 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4401 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4402 example).
4403
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004404- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004405 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004406 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004407 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004408
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004409- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4410 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4411 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004412 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004413
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004414- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4415 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4416 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4417 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4418 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4419 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4420
4421 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4422
4423 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4424
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004425Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004426-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004427
4428- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4429
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004430- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4431
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004432- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4433 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004434
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004435- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4436 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4437 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4438 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4439 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4440 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004441 attributes.
4442
4443- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4444 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4445 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004446
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004447- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4448 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4449 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004450
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004451- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4452 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4453 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004454 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4455 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4456
4457- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4458 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004459
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004460Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004461-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004462
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004463- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4464 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4465
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004466- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4467 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4468 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4469 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4470
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004471- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4472 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4473 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4474 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4475
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004476 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4477 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4478 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4479 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4480 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4481 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4482 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4483 without losing information).
4484
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004485- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004486 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4487 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4488 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4489 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4490 module).
4491
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004492 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004493 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4494 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4495 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4496 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004497
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004498- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004499 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4500 encoding.
4501
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004502- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4503 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4504
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004505- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004506 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4507
4508- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4509 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4510 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4511 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4512
4513- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4514
4515- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4516 ON, and OFF.
4517
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004518- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4519 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4520
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004521Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004522-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004523
4524- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4525 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4526 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004527
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004528- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4529 been added: -X and -E.
4530
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004531Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004532-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004533
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004534- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4535 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4536
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004537C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004538-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004539
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004540- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4541 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4542 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4543 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4544 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4545
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004546- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4547 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4548 as long) arguments.
4549
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004550- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4551 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4552 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4553 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4554 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4555 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4556
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004557- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4558 input.
4559
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004560New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004561-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004562
4563Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004564-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004565
4566Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004567-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004568
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004569- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4570 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4571 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4572
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004573- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4574 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4575 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004576 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004577
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004578 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4579 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4580 import signal
4581 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004582
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004583 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004584 while 1:
4585 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004586 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004587 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4588 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4589 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4590 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004591
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004592
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004593What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4594===========================
4595
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004596*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4597
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004598Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004599--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004600
4601- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4602 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4603 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4604
4605- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4606 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4607 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4608 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4609 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4610 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4611 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004612
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004613- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004614 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004615 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4616 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4617 associate a docstring with a property.
4618
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004619- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4620 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4621 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4622 other built-in object types.
4623
4624- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4625 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4626 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4627 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4628 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4629
4630- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4631 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4632
4633- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4634 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004635 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004636 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4637 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4638 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4639 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4640 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4641
4642- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4643 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4644 class.
4645
4646- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4647 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4648 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4649 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4650
4651- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4652 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4653 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4654 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4655
4656- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4657 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4658
4659- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4660 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4661 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4662 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4663 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004664 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004665 with the same value as s.
4666
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004667- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4668
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004669Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004670----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004671
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004672- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4673
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004674- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4675 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4676 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4677 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4678 objects.
4679
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004680- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4681 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004682 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4683 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4684
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004685- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4686 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4687 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4688
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004689Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004690-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004691
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004692- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4693 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4694 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4695 by the instances.
4696
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004697- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4698 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4699 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4700
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004701- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4702 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4703 before the entire comparison is complete.
4704
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004705- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4706 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4707 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4708
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004709- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4710 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4711 getwriter().
4712
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004713- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4714 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4715
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004716- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004717 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4718 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4719
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004720- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4721 iterable object.
4722
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004723- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4724 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004725
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004726- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4727 authentication.
4728
4729- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4730 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004731
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004732- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004733 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4734 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4735 a sample driver.)
4736
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004737Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004738-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004739
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004740- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4741 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4742 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4743 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4744 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4745 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4746 kernel has large file support.
4747
4748- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4749 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4750 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4751 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4752 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4753
4754- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4755 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4756 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4757
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004758C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004759-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004760
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004761- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4762 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4763
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004764New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004765-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004766
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004767- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4768 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4769
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004770Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004771-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004772
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004773- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4774 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4775 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4776 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4777 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4778
4779- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4780 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4781 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4782 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4783
4784- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4785 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4786
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004787Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004788-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004789
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004790- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004791 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4792 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004793
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004794
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004795What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4796===========================
4797
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004798*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4799
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004800Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004801----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004802
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004803- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4804 big to represent as a C double.
4805
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004806- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4807 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4808 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4809 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4810 restriction).
4811
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004812- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4813 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4814 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4815 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4816 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4817
4818 >>> dir([])
4819 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4820 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4821 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4822 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4823 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4824 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4825 'reverse', 'sort']
4826
4827 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4828
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004829- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004830 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4831 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4832 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4833 OverflowError exception.
4834
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004835- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004836 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004837 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4838 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4839 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4840 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4841 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004842 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004843 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4844 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4845
4846 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4847 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4848 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4849 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004850
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004851- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004852 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4853 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4854 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4855 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4856 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4857 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4858 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4859 once it is created.
4860
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004861- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4862 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4863 (key, value) pairs.
4864
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004865- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004866 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4867 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4868
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004869- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4870 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4871 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4872 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4873 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004874
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004875- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004876 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4877 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4878
4879 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4880
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004881- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004882 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4883
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004884Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004885-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004886
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004887- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004888 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4889 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004890
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004891- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4892 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4893 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4894 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4895 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4896 in this area anymore).
4897
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004898- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4899 threading.Timer.
4900
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004901- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4902 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4903
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004904- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004905 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4906
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004907- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004908 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4909 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4910 converted to Python longs.
4911
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004912- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004913 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4914
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004915- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4916 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4917 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4918
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004919Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004920-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004921
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004922- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4923 division operators as per PEP 238.
4924
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004925Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004926-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004927
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004928- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4929 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4930 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4931 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4932
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004933C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004934-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004935
4936- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004937
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004938- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4939 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004940 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004941
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004942 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4943 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004944 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004945 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004946
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004947- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004948 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4949 module:
4950
4951 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004952
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004953 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4954 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004955
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004956 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4957 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004958
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004959 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4960
4961 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4962
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004963- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004964 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4965 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4966 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004967
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004968New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004969-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004970
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004971- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4972 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4973 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4974 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4975 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004976
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004977Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004978-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004979
4980Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004981-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004982
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004983- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4984 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4985 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4986 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004987 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4988 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4989 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4990 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4991 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004992
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004993- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004994 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4995
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004996
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004997What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4998===========================
4999
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005000*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5001
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005002Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005003-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005004
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005005- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5006 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5007
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005008- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5009 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5010 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005011
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005012- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5013 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5014 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5015 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005016
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005017- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5018
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005019- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005020
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005021Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005022-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005023
5024- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005025 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005026 the module docstring for details.
5027
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005028Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005029-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005030
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005031- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005032 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5033 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5034 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005035
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005036- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5037 Nick Mathewson.
5038
5039Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005040----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005041
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005042- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5043 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5044 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5045 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5046 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5047 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5048 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5049 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5050
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005051- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5052 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5053 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5054 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5055
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005056- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5057 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5058 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5059 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5060 come a long way).
5061
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005062- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5063 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5064 write filters for these warnings).
5065
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005066- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5067 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5068 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5069 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5070 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5071
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005072- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5073 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5074 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5075 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5076 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5077 older distribution.
5078
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005079Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005080-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005081
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005082- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5083 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005084 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005085
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005086- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5087 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5088 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5089
5090- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5091
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005092- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5093
5094- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5095
5096- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5097
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005098- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005099
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005100- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5101
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005102New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005103-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005104
5105C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005106-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005107
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005108- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5109 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5110 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5111 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5112 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5113 against buffer overruns.
5114
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005115- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005116 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5117 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005118 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5119 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5120 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5121
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005122- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5123 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5124 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5125 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5126 deprecated.
5127
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005128Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005129-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005130
5131- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5132 relevant is found.
5133
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005134
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005135What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005136===========================
5137
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005138*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5139
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005140Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005141----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005142
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005143- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5144 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5145 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5146 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5147 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5148 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5149 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5150 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005151 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005152 repaired.
5153
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005154- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005155 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005156 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5157 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5158 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5159 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5160 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5161 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5162 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5163 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5164
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005165- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5166 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5167 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5168 leading BMO character).
5169
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005170- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5171 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5172 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5173
5174 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5175 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5176 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005177
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005178 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5179 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5180 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5181 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5182 for various simple to use conversions.
5183
5184 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5185 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5186
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005187 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5188 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5189 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5190 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5191 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5192 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5193 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5194 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5195 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5196 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5197 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5198 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5199 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5200 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5201 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005202
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005203- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5204 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5205 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005206 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005207 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005208
5209 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005210 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5211 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5212 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5213 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5214 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005215 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5216 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005217
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005218 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5219 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5220 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005221 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005222
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005223- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5224 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5225 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5226 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5227 floating arithmetic,
5228
5229 x = 9007199254740992.0
5230 print long(x)
5231
5232 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5233 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5234 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5235 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5236 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5237 functions are of good quality).
5238
5239 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5240 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5241 algorithms to break.
5242
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005243- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5244 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5245 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5246 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5247 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5248 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5249 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5250 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5251 order.
5252
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005253- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5254 operation along the most common code paths.
5255
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005256- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5257 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5258
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005259- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5260 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5261 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5262 {}.update(UserDict())
5263
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005264- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5265 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5266 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5267 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5268 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5269 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5270 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5271 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5272
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005273- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005274 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005275
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005276 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005277 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5278 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005279 join() method of strings
5280 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005281 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5282 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005283 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005284 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005285
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005286- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5287 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5288
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005289- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5290 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5291
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005292- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5293 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5294 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5295 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5296
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005297- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5298 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005299 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005300 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5301 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005302
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005303- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5304
5305
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005306Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005307-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005308
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005309- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005310 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005311 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5312 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5313
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005314- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5315 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5316
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005317- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5318 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5319 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5320 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5321
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005322- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5323 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5324 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5325
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005326- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5327
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005328- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5329
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005330- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5331 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5332 that are still imported into string.py).
5333
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005334- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5335
5336- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5337 Now it does.
5338
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005339- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5340
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005341- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5342 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5343 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5344 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5345 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005346 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5347 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005348
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005349- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5350 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5351 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5352 'help(object)'.
5353
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005354Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005355-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005356
5357- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005358 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005359 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5360 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5361
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005362- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005363 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5364 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005365
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005366C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005367-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005368
5369- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5370 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005371
5372----
5373
5374**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**