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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +000015- Patch 1433928:
16 - The copy module now "copies" function objects (as atomic objects).
17 - dict.__getitem__ now looks for a __missing__ hook before raising
18 KeyError.
19
Marc-André Lemburgfe4b34c2006-02-19 15:22:22 +000020- Fix the encodings package codec search function to only search
21 inside its own package. Fixes problem reported in patch #1433198.
22
23 Note: Codec packages should implement and register their own
24 codec search function. PEP 100 has the details.
25
Martin v. Löwis18e16552006-02-15 17:27:45 +000026- PEP 353: Using ssize_t as the index type.
27
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000028- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
29 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
30 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
31
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000032- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
33 configure would break checking curses.h.
34
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000035- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
36 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
37
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000038- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
39
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000040- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
41
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000042- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
43
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000044- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
45 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
46
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000047- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
48 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
49 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
50
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000051- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
52 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000053 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000054
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000055- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
56 now encodes backslash correctly.
57
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000058- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
59
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000060- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
61 and long longs.
62
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000063- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
64 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
65 message in this case.
66
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000067- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
68 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
69 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
70 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
71 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
72
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000073- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000074
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000075- Speed up some Unicode operations.
76
Martin v. Löwisbd260da2006-02-26 19:42:26 +000077- A new AST parser implementation was completed. The abstract
78 syntax tree is available for read-only (non-compile) access
79 to Python code.
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000080
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000081- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000082 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
83
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000084- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
85
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000086- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
87 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
88
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000089- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
90
91- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
92
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000093- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
94 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
95 was empty.
96
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000097- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
98 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
99
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000100- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +0000101 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000102
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +0000103- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
104 codes.
105
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +0000106- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
107 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
108 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
109
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +0000110- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
111 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
112
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +0000113- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +0000114 (fixes bug #1119418).
115
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000116- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
117
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000118- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
119 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
120
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000121- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
122 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
123 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
124
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000125- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
126
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000127- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
128 reference counts in some error exit cases.
129
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000130- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
131 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
132 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
133 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
134 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
135 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
136 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
137 realloc.
138
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000139- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
140 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
141
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000142- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
143 like their int counterparts.
144
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000145- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
146 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
147 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
148 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
149 for a longer write-up of the problem).
150
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000151- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
152 serializing floats.
153
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000154- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
155 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
156 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
157
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000158- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
159 278.
160
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000161- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
162 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
163 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
164 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000165 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000166 PyNumber_*().
167 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
168
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000169- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
170 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
171 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
172 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
173
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000174- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
175 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
176 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
177 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
178 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
179
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000180- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
181 disabled caused a crash.
182
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000183- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
184 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
185
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000186- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000187 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
188
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000189- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
190
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000191- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000192 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
193 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
194 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000195
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000196- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
197
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000198- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
199 returning None.
200
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000201- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000202 ('\') with a specific error message.
203
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000204- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
205
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000206- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
207 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
208
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000209- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000210 an ferror() call.
211
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000212- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
213 list.sort().
214
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000215- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
216 (2+3) --> (5).
217
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000218- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
219
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000220- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
221 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000222
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000223- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
224 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
225 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
226
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000227- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
228 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
229 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
230
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000231Extension Modules
232-----------------
233
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +0000234- Patch 1433928: Added a new type, defaultdict, to the collections module.
235 This uses the new __missing__ hook behavior added to dict (see above).
236
Georg Brandldbd83392006-02-20 09:42:33 +0000237- Bug #854823: socketmodule now builds on Sun platforms even when
238 INET_ADDRSTRLEN is not defined.
239
Georg Brandlf4f44152006-02-18 22:29:33 +0000240- Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify
241 a "command verb" to invoke on the file.
242
Neal Norwitz082b2df2006-02-07 07:04:46 +0000243- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
244 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
245
Neal Norwitz0e6bc8c2006-02-05 05:45:43 +0000246- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
247 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
248 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
249
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000250- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
251 than the system default domain.
252
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000253- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
254 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
255 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
256
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000257- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
258
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000259- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
260 before the env.
261
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000262- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
263
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000264- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
265
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000266- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
267 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
268 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
269
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000270- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
271 without prior setting of the userptr.
272
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000273- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
274
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000275- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
276
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000277- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
278 problem on AIX.
279
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000280- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
281
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000282- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
283
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000284- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
285
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000286- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
287 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
288
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000289- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
290 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
291
292- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
293
294- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000295
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000296- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
297 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
298
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000299- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
300
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000301- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
302 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
303
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000304- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
305 returns in cStringIO.c.
306
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000307- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
308 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
309
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000310- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
311
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000312- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
313
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000314- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
315 the file system encoding.
316
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000317- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
318 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000319
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000320- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
321
322- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000323 line without newlines.
324
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000325- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
326 on Windows.
327
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000328- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000329 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
330
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000331- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
332 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
333 for large or negative values.
334
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000335- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000336 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000337
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000338- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
339
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000340- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
341 if available on the platform.
342
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000343- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
344 available on the platform.
345
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000346- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
347 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
348
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000349- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
350
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000351- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
352 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
353 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
354
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000355- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
356
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000357- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
358 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
359
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000360- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000361 file size.
362
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000363- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
364
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000365- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
366 {remove_history,replace_history}
367
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000368- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
369 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000370
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000371- stat_float_times is now True.
372
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000373- array.array objects are now picklable.
374
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000375- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
376 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
377
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000378- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
379 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
380 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
381
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000382- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
383 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000384
385Library
386-------
387
Georg Brandl8f7c54e2006-02-20 08:40:38 +0000388- Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
389 not allowed by the specs.
390
391- Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
392 not allowed by the specs.
393
Georg Brandlc98eeed2006-02-19 14:57:47 +0000394- Patch #1215184: FileInput now can be given an opening hook which can
395 be used to control how files are opened.
396
Georg Brandlc029f872006-02-19 14:12:34 +0000397- Patch #1212287: fileinput.input() now has a mode parameter for
398 specifying the file mode input files should be opened with.
399
Georg Brandl67e9fb92006-02-19 13:56:17 +0000400- Patch #1215184: fileinput now has a fileno() function for getting the
401 current file number.
402
Georg Brandl602b9ba2006-02-19 13:26:36 +0000403- Patch #1349274: gettext.install() now optionally installs additional
404 translation functions other than _() in the builtin namespace.
405
Georg Brandle4662172006-02-19 09:51:27 +0000406- Patch #1337756: fileinput now accepts Unicode filenames.
407
Georg Brandl7b4e7c22006-02-18 21:10:56 +0000408- Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
409 two gigabytes.
410
Georg Brandl21dd1af2006-02-17 13:35:13 +0000411- Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
412
Georg Brandlbd3bc4d2006-02-17 09:52:53 +0000413- Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
414 return address using smtplib.
415
Georg Brandl0e1abe22006-02-17 09:48:14 +0000416- Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
417 in pydoc.
Georg Brandl501dd0d2006-02-17 09:45:40 +0000418
Martin v. Löwis00756902006-02-05 17:09:41 +0000419- Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
420 unless the system is Win32.
421
Martin v. Löwisc81e3a62006-01-30 15:04:31 +0000422- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000423 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
424 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
425
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000426- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
427
428- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000429
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000430- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
431
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000432- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000433 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000434
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000435- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
436 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000437
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000438- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
439
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000440- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
441
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000442- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
443 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
444 LoadError subclasses IOError.
445
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000446- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000447 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
448 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
449 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
450 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
451
452 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
453 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
454 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
455 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
456 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000457
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000458- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
459 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
460 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
461
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000462- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
463
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000464- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
465
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000466- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
467 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
468 illegal argument)
469
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000470- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
471 is an error in the format string.
472
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000473- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
474
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000475- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000476 "parent" argument.
477
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000478- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
479 for padding.
480
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000481- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
482 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
483
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000484- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
485 to get the correct encoding.
486
487- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
488 languages.
489
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000490- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
491
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000492- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
493
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000494- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
495
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000496- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
497 functionality.
498
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000499- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
500
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000501- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
502 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
503
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000504- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
505 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
506 match the Content-Length header.
507
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000508- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
509
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000510- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
511 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000512 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000513
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000514- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
515
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000516- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
517
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000518- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
519 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
520
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000521- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
522 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
523 Tkdnd.
524
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000525- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
526 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
527
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000528- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
529 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
530
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000531- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000532 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
533
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000534- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
535 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
536
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000537- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
538 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
539
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000540- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000541 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000542
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000543- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
544
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000545- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
546 error messages.
547
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000548- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
549
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000550- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
551 Bug #1224621.
552
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000553- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
554 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
555 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
556 terminates by raising StopIteration.
557
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000558- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
559
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000560- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
561 component of the path.
562
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000563- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
564 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
565 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
566 class at all.
567
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000568- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
569 files to PyPI.
570
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000571- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
572 them to PyPI.
573
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000574- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
575 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
576 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
577 work as expected.
578
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000579- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
580 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
581
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000582- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000583 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
584
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000585- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
586
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000587- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
588 to build.
589
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000590- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
591 symbolic links on Windows.
592
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000593- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000594 profile.py if available.
595
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000596- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
597
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000598- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
599 in LWPCookieJar.
600
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000601- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
602
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000603- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
604
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000605- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
606
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000607- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
608
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000609- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
610
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000611- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
612
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000613- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
614
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000615- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
616
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000617- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
618 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
619 be exploited in various ways.
620
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000621- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000622 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
623
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000624- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
625 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
626
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000627- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000628 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
629
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000630- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
631
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000632- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
633
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000634- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
635
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000636- Enhancements to the csv module:
637
638 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000639 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000640 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000641 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
642 reporting.
643 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
644 dictates.
645 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000646 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000647 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000648 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
649 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000650 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
651 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000652 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000653 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
654 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
655 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
656 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
657 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
658 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
659 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
660 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
661 without first creating a dialect class.
662 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
663 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
664 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000665 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000666 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
667 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000668 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
669 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
670 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
671 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000672 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
673 This has been fixed.
674
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000675- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
676 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
677 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
678 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
679
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000680- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
681
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000682- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
683 (Bug #951915).
684
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000685- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
686 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
687 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000688 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000689
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000690- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
691
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000692- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
693 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
694
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000695- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
696
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000697- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
698
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000699- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
700
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000701- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
702
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000703- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
704
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000705- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
706 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
707 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
708
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000709- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000710 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000711
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000712- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
713 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
714 tokenizer with very long source lines.
715
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000716- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
717 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
718 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000719
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000720- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
721 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000722
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000723- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
724 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
725
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000726- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
727 correctly.
728
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000729- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
730 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
731 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
732 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
733 between two lines.
734
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000735- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
736 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
737 handlers.
738
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000739- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000740 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
741 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000742
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000743- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
744 considering it exactly like a '*'.
745
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000746- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
747 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000748
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000749- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
750
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000751- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
752 touch the recursion limit.
753
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000754Build
755-----
756
Martin v. Löwis86d66262006-02-17 08:40:11 +0000757- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
758
Martin v. Löwis856bf9a2006-02-14 20:42:55 +0000759- Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
760
Martin v. Löwisa55e55e2006-02-11 15:55:14 +0000761- Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
762
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000763- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
764
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000765- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
766 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
767
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000768- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
769
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000770- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
771 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
772
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000773- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
774 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
775
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000776- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
777 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
778 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000779 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000780
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000781- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
782 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
783 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
784
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000785- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
786
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000787- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
788 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
789
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000790- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
791 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
792 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
793 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
794 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
795 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
796 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
797 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
798
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000799- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
800 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
801 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
802 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
803
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000804C API
805-----
806
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000807- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
808
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000809- Removed PyRange_New().
810
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000811- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
812 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
813 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
814 mappings.
815
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000816
817Tests
818-----
819
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000820- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000821
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000822- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
823 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
824
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000825
826Documentation
827-------------
828
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000829- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
830
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000831- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
832 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
833
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000834- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
835
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000836- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
837
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000838- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
839
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000840- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
841
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000842- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
843
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000844- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
845
846- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
847
848- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
849
850- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
851
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000852- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
853 Closes bug #1166582.
854
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000855- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
856 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
857 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
858
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000859Mac
860---
861
862
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000863New platforms
864-------------
865
866- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
867
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000868
869Tools/Demos
870-----------
871
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000872- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
873 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
874 source files that need an encoding declaration.
875 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
876
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000877- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
878
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000879- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000880
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000881- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
882 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000883
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000884What's New in Python 2.4 final?
885===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000886
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000887*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000888
889Core and builtins
890-----------------
891
892- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
893 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
894 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
895
896
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000897What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
898==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000899
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000900*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000901
902Core and builtins
903-----------------
904
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000905- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
906 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
907 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
908
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000909
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000910Library
911-------
912
913- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
914 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
915 raised is re-raised.
916
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000917- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
918 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
919
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000920- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
921 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
922 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
923 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
924 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
925 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
926 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
927 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
928 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
929 by the slice are recomputed now.
930
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000931- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000932
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000933Build
934-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000935
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000936- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
937 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
938 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000939
940C API
941-----
942
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000943- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
944
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000945
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000946What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
947================================
948
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000949*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000950
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000951License
952-------
953
954The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
955is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
956changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
957Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
958intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
959durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
960the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
961License::
962
963 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
964
965says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
966to Python 2.1.1.
967
968The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
969License Version 2.
970
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000971Core and builtins
972-----------------
973
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000974- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
975 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
976 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
977 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
978 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
979 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
980 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000981 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000982 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
983 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
984
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000985- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000986
987Extension Modules
988-----------------
989
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000990- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
991 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
992 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
993 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000994
995Library
996-------
997
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000998- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
999 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
1000 returned.
1001
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +00001002- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
1003
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +00001004- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
1005 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
1006
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +00001007- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
1008
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +00001009- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
1010 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001011
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +00001012- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
1013
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +00001014- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
1015
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001016- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +00001017 the source code is updated and reloaded.
1018
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001019Build
1020-----
1021
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001022- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001023
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001024What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
1025================================
1026
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +00001027*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001028
1029Core and builtins
1030-----------------
1031
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001032- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +00001033 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
1034
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +00001035- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
1036 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
1037 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
1038 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
1039
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001040- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
1041 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
1042
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +00001043- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
1044 constant.
1045
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001046- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
1047 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
1048 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
1049 large), and to anomalies such as
1050 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
1051 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
1052 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
1053 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001054
1055Extension modules
1056-----------------
1057
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +00001058- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
1059 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001060 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
1061 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
1062 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001063
1064Library
1065-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001066
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001067- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001068 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001069 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
1070 --swig-cpp.
1071
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001072- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1073 it is set.
1074
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001075- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001076
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001077- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1078 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1079 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1080 Closes bug #1039270.
1081
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001082- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001083
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001084 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001085 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1086 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1087 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1088 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1089 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1090 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1091 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1092 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1093 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1094 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1095 + Updates to documentation.
1096
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001097- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1098 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1099 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1100 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1101
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001102- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001103
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001104- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1105 applications should use the getmember function.
1106
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001107- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1108
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001109- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1110 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1111 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1112 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1113 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1114 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1115 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1116 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1117 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1118
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001119- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1120 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001121 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001122
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001123- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1124 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1125 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1126 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1127 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1128 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1129 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1130 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001131
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001132- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1133 the new public features (of which there are many).
1134
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001135- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001136 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1137 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1138 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1139 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001140 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001141
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001142- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1143
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001144- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1145 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1146 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1147 options.
1148
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001149- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1150 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1151 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1152 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1153 conditions under which non-string values work.
1154
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001155Build
1156-----
1157
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001158- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1159 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1160 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1161
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001162- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1163 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1164 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1165 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1166 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001167
1168C API
1169-----
1170
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001171- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1172 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1173
1174- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1175
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001176- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1177 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1178 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1179 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1180 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1181 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1182 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1183 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1184 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1185
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001186- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1187
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001188- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1189 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1190 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001191
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001192Tests
1193-----
1194
1195- test__locale ported to unittest
1196
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001197Mac
1198---
1199
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001200- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1201 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1202 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001203
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001204Tools/Demos
1205-----------
1206
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001207- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1208 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1209 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1210 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1211 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001212
1213
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001214What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1215=================================
1216
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001217*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001218
1219Core and builtins
1220-----------------
1221
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001222- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001223 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1224
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001225- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1226 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1227 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1228 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1229 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1230 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1231 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1232 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001233 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1234 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1235 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1236 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1237 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001238
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001239- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1240 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1241 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1242 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1243 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1244
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001245- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1246
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001247- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1248 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1249
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001250- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1251 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1252 modified the list.
1253
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001254- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1255 functions is now writable.
1256
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001257- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1258 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1259 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1260 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1261
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001262- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1263 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1264 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1265 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1266 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001267
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001268- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1269 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1270
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001271Extension modules
1272-----------------
1273
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001274- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1275
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001276- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1277 data.
1278
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001279- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1280 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1281 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1282 supposed to have been truncated away.
1283
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001284- Added socket.socketpair().
1285
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001286- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1287 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1288
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001289- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001290 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1291
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001292Library
1293-------
1294
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001295- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001296 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001297
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001298- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1299 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1300
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001301- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1302 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1303
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001304- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1305
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001306- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1307 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001308
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001309- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1310 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1311
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001312- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1313
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001314- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1315
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001316- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1317
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001318- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1319 Percivall.
1320
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001321- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1322 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1323
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001324- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1325 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1326 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001327 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001328
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001329- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1330 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1331 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1332 and exponent.
1333
1334- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1335
1336- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001337 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001338 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1339
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001340- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1341 to the readline module.
1342
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001343- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001344 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1345 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001346
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001347- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1348 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1349 contains symlinks.
1350
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001351- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1352 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1353
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001354- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1355 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1356 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1357
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001358- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1359 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1360 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1361 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1362 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1363 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1364 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1365 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1366 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1367 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1368 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1369 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1370 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1371
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001372- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1373
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001374Tools/Demos
1375-----------
1376
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001377- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1378 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1379
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001380- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1381
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001382Build
1383-----
1384
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001385- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1386 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1387 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1388 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1389 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1390 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1391 plans to do so.
1392
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001393- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1394 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1395
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001396- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1397 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1398
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001399- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1400 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1401
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001402- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1403 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1404
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001405- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1406 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1407
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001408C API
1409-----
1410
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001411..
1412
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001413Documentation
1414-------------
1415
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001416- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1417 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1418
1419- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1420 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1421 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001422
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001423New platforms
1424-------------
1425
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001426- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1427
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001428Tests
1429-----
1430
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001431..
1432
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001433Windows
1434-------
1435
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001436- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1437 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1438 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1439 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1440 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1441 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1442 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1443 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1444 the problem.
1445
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001446Mac
1447---
1448
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001449..
1450
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001451
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001452What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1453=================================
1454
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001455*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001456
1457Core and builtins
1458-----------------
1459
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001460- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1461 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1462 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1463 sensitive code.
1464
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001465- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001466 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001467
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001468 @staticmethod
1469 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001470
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001471 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001472
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001473- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1474 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1475 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1476 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1477 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1478 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1479 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1480 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1481 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1482 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1483 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1484
1485 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1486 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1487 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1488 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1489 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1490 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1491 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1492
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001493- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1494 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1495
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001496- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001497 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001498
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001499- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001500 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001501 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1502
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001503- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001504 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1505 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1506
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001507- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1508 types that support garbage collection.
1509
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001510- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1511
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001512- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1513 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1514 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1515 Jython.
1516
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001517- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1518
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001519- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1520 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1521
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001522- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1523 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1524 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001525
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001526- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1527 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1528 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1529
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001530Extension modules
1531-----------------
1532
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001533- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1534
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001535Library
1536-------
1537
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001538- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1539 TIS-620
1540
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001541- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1542 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1543 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1544 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1545 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1546 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1547 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1548 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1549 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1550 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1551
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001552- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1553
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001554- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1555 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1556 same as when the argument is omitted).
1557 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1558
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001559- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1560
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001561- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1562 schemes are offered.
1563
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001564- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1565
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001566- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1567 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1568 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1569
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001570- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1571
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001572- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1573 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1574
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001575- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1576 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1577 when dummy_threading is being used.
1578
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001579- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1580 from a tarfile.
1581
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001582- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001583 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001584
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001585- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1586 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1587 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1588 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1589
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001590- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1591 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1592
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001593- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1594 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1595 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1596 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1597 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1598 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1599 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1600 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1601 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1602 by some other method in progress).
1603
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001604- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1605 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1606 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001607
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001608- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1609
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001610- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1611 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1612 AM Kuchling.
1613
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001614- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1615 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1616 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1617
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001618- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1619 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1620 instead of unsigned.
1621
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001622- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001623 no longer part of the public API.
1624
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001625- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1626 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1627 string methods of the same name).
1628
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001629- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001630 SF patch 945642.
1631
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001632- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1633
1634 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1635
1636 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1637 DocTestSuites.
1638
1639- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1640 that provide thread-local data.
1641
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001642- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1643 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1644
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001645- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1646
1647- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1648 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1649 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1650
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001651- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1652
1653 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1654 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1655 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001656
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001657 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1658 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1659 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1660 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1661
1662 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1663 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1664
1665 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1666 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1667 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1668 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1669
1670 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1671 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1672 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1673 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1674 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1675
1676 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1677 wrapping help output.
1678
1679 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1680 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1681 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001682
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001683C API
1684-----
1685
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001686- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1687 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1688 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1689 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1690 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1691 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1692 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1693 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1694 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1695 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1696 its visible semantics have not changed.
1697
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001698- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1699 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1700
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001701Documentation
1702-------------
1703
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001704- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001705
1706 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001707 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001708
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001709 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001710
1711 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1712
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001713- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001714
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001715Tests
1716-----
1717
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001718- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001719 platforms that use the Makefile.
1720
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001721- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1722 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1723 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1724
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001725
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001726What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1727=================================
1728
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001729*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001730
1731Core and builtins
1732-----------------
1733
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001734- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1735 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1736 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1737 objects now (one object instead of three).
1738
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001739- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1740 Windows DLLs.
1741
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001742- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1743 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001744
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001745- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1746 a new .pyc magic.
1747
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001748- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1749 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1750 be there.
1751
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001752- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1753 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1754 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1755
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001756- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1757 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1758 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1759
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001760- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1761
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001762- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1763 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1764 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001765
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001766- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1767 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1768
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001769- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1770
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001771- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001772 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001773
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001774- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1775
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001776- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1777
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001778- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1779 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1780
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001781- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1782 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1783 Fixes bug #858016 .
1784
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001785- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1786 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1787 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1788
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001789- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1790 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1791 improves their performance (about 35%).
1792
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001793- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1794 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1795 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1796
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001797- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1798 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1799 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1800 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1801
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001802- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1803 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001804 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001805 length is not known).
1806
1807- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1808 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001809 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1810 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001811 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1812
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001813- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1814 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1815
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001816- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1817 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1818 keyword arguments.
1819
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001820- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1821 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1822 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1823
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001824- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1825 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1826 cases.
1827
1828- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1829 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1830 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1831 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1832 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1833 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1834 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1835 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1836 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1837 a release build.
1838
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001839- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1840 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1841
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001842- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001843 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001844
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001845- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1846 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1847 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1848 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1849 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1850 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1851 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1852 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1853 destroyed.
1854
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001855- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1856 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1857 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1858 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1859 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1860 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1861 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1862 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1863
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001864- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1865 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1866 character other than a space.
1867
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001868- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1869 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1870 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1871 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1872 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1873 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1874 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1875 attributes with the same name.
1876
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001877- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1878 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1879 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1880 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1881 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1882 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1883 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1884 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1885 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1886 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1887 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1888 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1889 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1890 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001891
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001892- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1893 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1894 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1895 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1896 This has been repaired.
1897
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001898- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1899
1900- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1901
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001902- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1903 over a sequence.
1904
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001905- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001906 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001907
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001908- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1909
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001910- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1911 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1912 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1913 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1914 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1915 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1916 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1917 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1918
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001919- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1920 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1921 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1922
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001923- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1924 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1925 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1926 freelist.
1927
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001928- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1929 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1930
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001931- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1932 number.
1933
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001934- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1935 a TypeError exception.
1936
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001937- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1938 820195.
1939
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001940- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1941 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1942 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1943
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001944- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001945 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1946 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001947
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001948- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1949 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1950 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1951
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001952- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1953 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001954 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001955
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001956- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001957 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1958 the first call.
1959
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001960
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001961Extension modules
1962-----------------
1963
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001964- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1965 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1966
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001967- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1968 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1969 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1970 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1971 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1972 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1973 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001974
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001975- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1976
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001977- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1978
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001979- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1980 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1981
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001982- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1983 fewer false positives.
1984
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001985- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1986 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1987
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001988- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001989 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1990
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001991- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001992 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001993 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001994 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1995 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001996
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001997- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1998 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1999 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
2000 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
2001
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00002002- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
2003 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
2004 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
2005 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
2006 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
2007 #897625.
2008
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00002009- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
2010 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
2011
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00002012- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
2013 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
2014 and pops on either side of the deque.
2015
2016- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
2017 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
2018
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00002019- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
2020 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
2021 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
2022 other functions that expect a function argument.
2023
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00002024- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
2025
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002026- os.getsid was added.
2027
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00002028- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
2029 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
2030 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
2031
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00002032- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
2033
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00002034- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
2035
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00002036- readline.clear_history was added.
2037
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00002038- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
2039
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00002040- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
2041
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00002042- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
2043
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00002044- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
2045
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00002046- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
2047
2048- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
2049
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00002050- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
2051
2052- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
2053
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002054- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
2055 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
2056 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
2057
2058- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
2059 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
2060 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
2061 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
2062 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
2063 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
2064 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
2065
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00002066- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
2067 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
2068 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
2069 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002070
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002071- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002072 iterators from a single iterable.
2073
2074- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2075 of raising a TypeError exception.
2076
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002077- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2078 as parameter.
2079
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002080Library
2081-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002082
Armin Rigoa871ef22006-02-08 12:53:56 +00002083- Added a new module: cProfile, a C profiler with the same interface as the
2084 profile module. cProfile avoids some of the drawbacks of the hotshot
2085 profiler and provides a bit more information than the other two profilers.
2086 Based on "lsprof" (patch #1212837).
2087
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002088- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2089
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002090- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2091 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2092 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002093
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002094- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2095 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2096 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002097
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002098- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002099
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002100- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2101 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002102
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002103- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2104 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2105
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002106- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2107
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002108- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002109 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002110
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002111- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002112 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002113
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002114- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2115
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002116- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2117 on cygwin and mingw32.
2118
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002119- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2120
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002121- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2122 module.
2123
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002124- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2125 installation scheme for all platforms.
2126
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002127- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002128 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002129
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002130- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2131 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2132 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2133
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002134- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2135 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2136 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2137
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002138- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2139
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002140- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2141
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002142- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2143 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2144
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002145- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2146 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2147 type pattern with the same value exists.
2148
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002149- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2150 when run from the command prompt).
2151
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002152- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2153 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2154
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002155- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2156 default sort).
2157
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002158- Added global runctx function to profile module
2159
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002160- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2161
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002162- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2163
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002164- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2165
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002166- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002167 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2168 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2169 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2170 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2171 accordingly.
2172
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002173- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2174 decoding standards.
2175
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002176- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2177 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2178 called for all requests.
2179
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002180- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2181 they are passed to the compiler.
2182
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002183- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2184 indent, width and depth.
2185
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002186- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2187 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2188
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002189- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2190 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2191
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002192- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2193
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002194- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2195
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002196- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2197
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002198- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2199 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2200
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002201- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002202 for better performance.
2203
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002204- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002205
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002206- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2207 a string).
2208
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002209- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2210
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002211- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2212
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002213- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2214
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002215- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2216
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002217- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2218 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2219 list of fieldnames.
2220
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002221- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2222 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2223
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002224- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2225
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002226- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2227 empty lists.
2228
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002229- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2230 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2231 and shelves.
2232
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002233- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2234 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2235
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002236- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002237 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2238 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002239
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002240- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2241 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002242 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002243
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002244- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002245 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2246 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2247
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002248- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2249 and removed in Py2.4.
2250
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002251- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2252
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002253- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2254
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002255Tools/Demos
2256-----------
2257
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002258- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2259 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2260
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002261- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2262
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002263- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2264 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2265 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2266 destination in situations where both files are given.
2267
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002268- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2269 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2270 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2271 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2272
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002273- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2274
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002275- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2276 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2277 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2278 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2279 now.
2280
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002281- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2282 in effect
2283
2284- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2285 C-c C-h
2286
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002287- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2288 -d option was given.
2289
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002290Build
2291-----
2292
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002293- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2294 build under OS X.
2295
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002296- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2297 --enable-profiling.
2298
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002299- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2300 is configured --with-tsc.
2301
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002302- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2303 on AMD64.
2304
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002305- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2306 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2307
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002308- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2309 removed.
2310
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002311- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2312 supported (see PEP 11).
2313
2314- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2315
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002316- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2317
2318- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2319 (see PEP 11).
2320
2321- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2322 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2323
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002324C API
2325-----
2326
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002327- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2328 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2329 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2330
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002331- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2332 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2333 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2334 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2335
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002336- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2337 generator objects.
2338
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002339- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2340 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002341 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2342 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002343
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002344- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2345 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2346
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002347- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2348 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2349 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2350 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2351 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2352
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002353- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2354 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2355 about 10% faster.
2356
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002357- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2358 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2359
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002360- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2361 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2362 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2363 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2364
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002365Windows
2366-------
2367
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002368- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2369 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2370 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2371 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2372
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002373- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2374 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2375 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2376
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002377
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002378What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2379===============================
2380
2381*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2382
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002383IDLE
2384----
2385
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002386- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2387 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2388 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2389 context-menu actions.
2390
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002391- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2392 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2393 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2394 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2395 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2396 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2397 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2398 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2399 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2400
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002401
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002402What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2403=============================================
2404
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002405*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002406
2407Core and builtins
2408-----------------
2409
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002410- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002411 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002412 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2413
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002414Extension modules
2415-----------------
2416
2417- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2418 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2419 than once. This has been fixed.
2420
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002421- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2422 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2423 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2424 call.
2425
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002426- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2427
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002428Library
2429-------
2430
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002431- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2432 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2433
2434- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2435 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2436 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2437 restored.
2438
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002439IDLE
2440----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002441
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002442- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002443
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002444Build
2445-----
2446
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002447- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2448 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2449
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002450C API
2451-----
2452
2453Windows
2454-------
2455
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002456- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2457 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2458
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002459- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2460
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002461Mac
2462---
2463
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002464- Various fixes to pimp.
2465
2466- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2467
2468- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2469 more problems than it solves.
2470
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002471
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002472What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2473=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002474
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002475*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2476
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002477Core and builtins
2478-----------------
2479
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002480- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2481 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2482
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002483- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2484 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002485 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002486
2487- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2488 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2489 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002490 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002491
2492- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2493 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002494
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002495- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2496 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2497 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2498
2499- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002500 770247.
2501
2502- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002503
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002504Extension modules
2505-----------------
2506
2507- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2508 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2509
2510- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2511
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002512- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2513
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002514- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2515 contained within the _strptime module.
2516
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002517- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2518 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2519
2520- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002521 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2522
2523- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2524 the find_class attribute, if present.
2525
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002526- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002527
2528 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2529 (SF bug 763298).
2530
2531 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002532 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2533 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2534 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002535
2536 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2537
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002538Library
2539-------
2540
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002541- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2542
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002543- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2544 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2545 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2546 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2547 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2548 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2549 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2550 or Tester().
2551
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002552- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2553 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2554 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2555 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2556 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2557 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2558 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2559 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2560 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002561
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002562 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002563
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002564- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2565 weren't before was an oversight.
2566
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002567- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2568 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2569
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002570- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2571 when there are no lines.
2572
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002573- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2574 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2575
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002576- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2577 to child processes.
2578
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002579- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2580
2581- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2582
2583- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2584 xmlrpclib.
2585
2586- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2587 responses.
2588
2589- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2590 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2591
2592- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2593 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2594 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2595
2596- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2597 used as patterns.
2598
2599- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2600 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2601 than Tk 8.3.
2602
2603- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2604
2605- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002606
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002607Tools/Demos
2608-----------
2609
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002610- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2611
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002612- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2613
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002614- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002615
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002616Build
2617-----
2618
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002619- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2620
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002621- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2622
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002623- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2624 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002625
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002626- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2627 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2628 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002629
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002630C API
2631-----
2632
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002633- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2634 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2635
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002636Windows
2637-------
2638
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002639- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2640 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2641 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2642 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2643 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2644 Python exception ::
2645
2646 thread.error: can't start new thread
2647
2648 is raised now.
2649
2650- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2651 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2652 instead of from DLL teardown.
2653
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002654Mac
2655---
2656
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002657- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002658 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002659 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2660 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2661 the executable in the bundle.
2662
2663- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002664
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002665- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2666
2667- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2668 on Panther.
2669
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002670What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2671================================
2672
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002673*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002674
2675Core and builtins
2676-----------------
2677
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002678- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2679 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2680 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2681 with the -i option.
2682
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002683- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2684 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2685
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002686- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2687 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2688
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002689- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2690 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2691 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2692 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2693 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2694 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2695 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2696 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2697 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2698 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2699 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2700 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2701 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002702
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002703- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2704 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2705 embedded in a lambda expression.
2706
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002707- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2708 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2709 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2710 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2711 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2712
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002713- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2714 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2715 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2716
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002717- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2718 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2719
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002720- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2721 It's writable again.
2722
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002723- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2724 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2725 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002726 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002727
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002728- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2729 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2730 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2731
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002732Extension modules
2733-----------------
2734
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002735- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2736 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2737
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002738- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2739 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2740 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2741 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2742
2743- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2744 collection.
2745
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002746- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2747 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2748 unique within a single program run.
2749
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002750- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2751 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2752
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002753- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2754 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2755
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002756- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2757 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002758
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002759- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2760
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002761- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2762 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2763
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002764- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2765 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2766 for many BSD-derived systems.
2767
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002768
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002769Library
2770-------
2771
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002772- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2773 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2774 primary ones:
2775
2776 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2777 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2778 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2779
2780 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2781 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2782 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2783 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2784 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2785 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2786
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002787- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2788 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2789 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2790 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2791 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2792 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2793 argument.
2794
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002795- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2796 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2797 in the archive.
2798
2799- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2800 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2801
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002802- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2803 569574).
2804
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002805- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2806 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2807 no more.
2808
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002809- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2810 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2811 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2812 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2813 code coverage.
2814
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002815- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2816 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2817 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002818 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2819 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002820
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002821- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2822 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2823 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002824 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002825
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002826- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2827
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002828- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2829 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2830 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2831 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2832
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002833- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2834 handling.
2835
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002836- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2837 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2838
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002839- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2840 in socket.py.
2841
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002842- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2843
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002844- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2845 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2846 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2847 opener with proxy support.
2848
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002849- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2850
2851- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2852
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002853Tools/Demos
2854-----------
2855
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002856- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2857
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002858- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2859
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002860- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2861 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002862
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002863- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2864 files.
2865
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002866Build
2867-----
2868
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002869- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002870 different root directory.
2871
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002872C API
2873-----
2874
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002875- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2876 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2877 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2878 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2879 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2880 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2881 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2882 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2883 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2884 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2885
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002886- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2887 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2888 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2889 from Python.
2890
2891
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002892New platforms
2893-------------
2894
2895None this time.
2896
2897Tests
2898-----
2899
2900- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2901 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2902
2903Windows
2904-------
2905
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002906- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2907
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002908- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2909 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2910 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2911 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2912 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2913 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2914 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2915 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2916 that's what it's for.
2917
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002918Mac
2919---
2920
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002921- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2922 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2923 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2924 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002925- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2926 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2927- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002928
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002929SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2930------------------------------------
2931
2932430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2933598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2934622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2935661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2936683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2937697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2938713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2939724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2940727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2941729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2942730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2943731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2944732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2945733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2946735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2947740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2948744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2949745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2950747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2951749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2952751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2953753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2954755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2955757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2956760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2957
2958
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002959What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2960================================
2961
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002962*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002963
2964Core and builtins
2965-----------------
2966
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002967- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2968 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2969
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002970- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2971 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2972 and cannot be strings).
2973
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002974- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2975 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2976 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2977 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2978
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002979- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2980 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2981 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2982 Python itself.
2983
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002984- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2985 the referenced object, if it has one.
2986
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002987- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2988 the thread started at
2989 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2990
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002991- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2992 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2993 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2994 placed on a list index.
2995
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002996- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2997 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2998 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2999 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
3000
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003001- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
3002 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
3003 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
3004 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
3005 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
3006 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
3007 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
3008
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00003009- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
3010 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
3011 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
3012 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
3013 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
3014
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00003015- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
3016 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00003017
3018- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
3019 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
3020 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
3021 #693195.)
3022
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00003023- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
3024 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003025
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003026- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00003027 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003028 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
3029 interpreter executions, would fail.
3030
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003031- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00003032 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00003033 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003034
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003035Extension modules
3036-----------------
3037
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00003038- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
3039 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
3040 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
3041 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
3042
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00003043- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
3044 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
3045
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00003046- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
3047 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
3048 and Greg Chapman.)
3049
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003050- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
3051 recursively.
3052
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00003053- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00003054 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
3055 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
3056 leaks.
3057
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00003058- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
3059
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00003060- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
3061 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
3062 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
3063 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
3064 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
3065 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
3066 #705836.
3067
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00003068- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00003069 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
3070
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00003071- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
3072 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
3073 See SF bug #692416.
3074
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00003075- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3076 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3077
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003078- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3079 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3080 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003081
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003082- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003083 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3084 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3085
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003086- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3087 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3088 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3089 timeouts to work properly.
3090
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003091Library
3092-------
3093
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003094- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3095 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3096 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3097 future release.
3098
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003099- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3100 for querying platform dependent features.
3101
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003102- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003103
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003104- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3105 pickle protocol versions.
3106
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003107- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3108 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3109 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3110
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003111- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3112
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003113- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3114 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3115 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3116 modules.
3117
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003118- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3119 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3120 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3121
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003122- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3123 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3124
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003125- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3126 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3127 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3128
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003129- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003130 MS Office extensions.
3131
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003132- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3133 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3134
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003135- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3136 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3137
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003138- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3139 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3140 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3141 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3142 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3143 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3144
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003145- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3146 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3147 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003148
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003149- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3150 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3151 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3152
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003153- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3154
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003155- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3156 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3157 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3158
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003159Tools/Demos
3160-----------
3161
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003162- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3163 See the module docstring for details.
3164
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003165Build
3166-----
3167
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003168- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3169 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003170
3171C API
3172-----
3173
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003174- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3175
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003176- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3177 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3178 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3179
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003180- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3181 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003182
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003183 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3184 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3185 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003186
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003187- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003188 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3189
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003190- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3191 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3192 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003193
3194New platforms
3195-------------
3196
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003197None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003198
3199Tests
3200-----
3201
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003202- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3203 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003204
3205Windows
3206-------
3207
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003208- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3209 function.
3210
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003211- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3212 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003213
3214Mac
3215---
3216
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003217- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3218 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003219
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003220- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3221 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003222
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003223- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3224 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3225 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003226
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003227- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003228 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3229 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003230
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003231- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3232 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003233
3234
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003235What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3236=================================
3237
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003238*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003239
3240Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003241-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003242
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003243- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3244 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3245 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3246
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003247- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3248 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3249 (SF patch #664376.)
3250
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003251- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3252 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3253 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3254 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3255 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3256 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003257 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003258
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003259- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3260 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3261 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3262 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003263 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003264
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003265- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3266 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3267 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3268 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3269 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3270 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3271 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3272 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3273 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3274 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3275 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3276
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003277- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3278 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3279 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3280 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3281 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3282 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3283
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003284- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3285 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3286
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003287- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3288 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3289 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3290 case.)
3291
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003292- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3293 passed as unicode strings.
3294
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003295- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3296 See SF bug #683467.
3297
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003298- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3299 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3300
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003301- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3302
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003303- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3304
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003305- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3306 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3307 arguments.
3308
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003309- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3310 See SF bug #667147.
3311
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003312- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003313 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003314 See SF bug #676155.
3315
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003316- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003317 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003318 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3319 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3320 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3321 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3322 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3323 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003324
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003325Extension modules
3326-----------------
3327
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003328- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3329 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3330 tp_as_number pointer.
3331
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003332- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3333 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3334 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3335 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3336 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3337
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003338- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3339
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003340- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3341
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003342- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003343 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003344 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3345 patch #678531.)
3346
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003347- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3348 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3349
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003350- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3351 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3352
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003353- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3354
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003355- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3356 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3357 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3358
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003359- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3360
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003361- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3362 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3363
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003364- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003365
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003366- datetime changes:
3367
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003368 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3369
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003370 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3371 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3372 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3373 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3374 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3375 now.
3376
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003377 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003378 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3379 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003380
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003381 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003382 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003383 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3384 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3385 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3386 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003387
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003388 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3389 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3390 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003391 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3392
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003393 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3394 by a later example coded by Guido.
3395
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003396 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003397 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3398 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3399 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003400 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3401 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3402
3403 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3404 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3405 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3406 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3407 tzinfo subclass instance.
3408
3409 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3410 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3411 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3412 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3413 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3414 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3415 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3416 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003417
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003418 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3419 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3420 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3421 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3422 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003423 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3424
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003425 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003426
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003427 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3428 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3429 as a naive datetime object.
3430
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003431 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3432 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3433 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3434
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003435 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3436 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3437 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3438 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3439 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3440 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3441 comparison.
3442
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003443 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3444 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3445 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3446 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003447 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003448
3449 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003450
3451 and ::
3452
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003453 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3454
3455 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3456 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3457 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3458 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3459
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003460 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3461 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3462 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3463 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3464 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3465
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003466 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3467 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003468 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3469 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003470
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003471Library
3472-------
3473
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003474- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3475 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3476
3477- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3478 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3479 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3480 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3481 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3482 See PEP 307 for details.
3483
3484- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3485 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3486
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003487- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3488 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003489 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003490 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3491 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003492 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003493
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003494- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3495 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3496
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003497- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3498 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3499 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3500
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003501- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3502
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003503- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3504 exception.
3505
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003506- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3507 class.
3508
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003509- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3510 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3511 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3512
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003513- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3514 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3515
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003516- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003517 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3518 See SF bug #659228.
3519
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003520- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3521 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3522 See SF patch #651082.
3523
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003524- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003525
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003526- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3527 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3528
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003529- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003530 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003531
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003532- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3533 DOS paths from other platforms.
3534
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003535Tools/Demos
3536-----------
3537
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003538- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3539 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3540 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3541 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3542 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3543 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3544 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3545 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3546 example:
3547
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003548 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3549 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003550
3551 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3552
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003553
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003554Build
3555-----
3556
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003557- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3558 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3559 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003560 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3561
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003562 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3563
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003564- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3565 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3566 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3567 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3568 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3569 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3570 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3571 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3572 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3573
3574- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3575 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3576 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3577 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3578
3579- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3580 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3581
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003582C API
3583-----
3584
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003585- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3586 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003587
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003588- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3589 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3590 tp_as_number pointer.
3591
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003592- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3593 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3594 (SF #681367)
3595
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003596- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3597 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3598 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3599 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003600
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003601Tests
3602-----
3603
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003604- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003605 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3606 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3607 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3608 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3609 pydoc.)
3610
3611- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3612
3613- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003614
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003615Windows
3616-------
3617
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003618- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3619 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3620 time).
3621
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003622- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3623 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3624
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003625- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3626 release without strong cryptography.
3627
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003628- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003629 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003630
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003631- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3632 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3633
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003634Mac
3635---
3636
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003637- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3638 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003639
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003640- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3641 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3642 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003643
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003644- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3645 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003646
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003647- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3648 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3649 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3650 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003651
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003652- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003653 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3654 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3655 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003656
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003657
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003658What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003659=================================
3660
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003661*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003662
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003663Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003664--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003665
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003666- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3667
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003668- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3669 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003670 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003671 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003672 a different meaning than before.
3673
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003674- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003675 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003676 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003677
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003678- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003679 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003680 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003681
3682- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3683 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3684 and deallocation.
3685
3686- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3687 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3688
3689- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3690 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3691 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3692 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3693 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3694
3695- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3696 now detected by the garbage collector.
3697
3698- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3699 [SF bug 519621]
3700
3701- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3702 identifier.
3703
3704- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3705 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3706 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3707 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3708 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3709 [SF bug 563060]
3710
3711- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3712 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3713 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3714 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3715 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3716
3717- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3718 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3719 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3720
3721- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3722
3723- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3724 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3725 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3726 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3727 state of the slots would be lost.)
3728
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003729Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003730-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003731
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003732- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003733 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3734 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3735 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3736 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003737 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3738 Jython 2.1.
3739
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003740- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003741 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003742 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3743 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3744 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3745 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3746 these, see PEP 302.
3747
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003748- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3749 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3750 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3751
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003752- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3753 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3754 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3755
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003756- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3757 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3758 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3759
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003760- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3761 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3762 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3763 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3764 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3765 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3766 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3767 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3768 releases or implementations.
3769
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003770- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003771 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3772 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003773
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003774- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3775 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3776
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003777- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3778 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3779 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3780
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003781- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3782 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3783
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003784- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3785 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003786 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3787 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003788
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003789- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3790 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3791 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3792 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3793 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3794
3795 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3796 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3797 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3798 pattern.
3799
3800 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3801 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3802 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3803 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3804
3805 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3806 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3807 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3808 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3809 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3810 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3811
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003812- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3813 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3814 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3815 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3816 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3817 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3818 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3819 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003820
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003821- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3822 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3823 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3824 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3825 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003826 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3827 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3828 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3829 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3830 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3831 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3832 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003833
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003834- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3835 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3836
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003837- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3838 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3839 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3840 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3841 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3842 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3843 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3844 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3845 to Zack Weinberg!
3846
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003847- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3848 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3849 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3850 type. This has been fixed now.
3851
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003852- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3853 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3854 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3855
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003856- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3857 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3858 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3859 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3860 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3861 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3862 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3863 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003864 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003865
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003866- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3867 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3868 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003869
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003870- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3871 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3872 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3873 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3874 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3875 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3876 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3877 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003878 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003879 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3880 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3881
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003882- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3883 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3884 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3885 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3886 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3887 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3888 this.)
3889
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003890- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3891 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003892 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003893 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003894 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3895 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003896 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3897 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003898
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003899- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3900 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3901 currently running.
3902
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003903- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3904 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3905 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3906 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3907
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003908- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3909 as directory names.
3910
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003911- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3912 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3913
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003914- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3915 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3916
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003917- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003918 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3919 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003920
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003921- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3922 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3923 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3924 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3925 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3926
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003927- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3928 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3929 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3930 removed.
3931
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003932- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3933 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3934 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3935
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003936- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3937 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3938 to __debug__.
3939
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003940- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3941 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3942 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3943
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003944- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3945 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3946 deprecated now.
3947
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003948- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3949 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3950 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003951
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003952- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3953 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3954 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3955 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3956 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003957
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003958- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3959 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3960
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003961- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3962 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3963 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003964 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003965 is backward compatible.
3966
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003967- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3968 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3969 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3970 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3971 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3972
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003973- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3974 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3975 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3976 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3977 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3978 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003979
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003980- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3981 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3982
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003983- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3984 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3985
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003986- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3987 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3988 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3989 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3990 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3991
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003992- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3993 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3994 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3995
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003996- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003997 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3998
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003999- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
4000 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
4001 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00004002
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00004003- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
4004 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
4005
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00004006- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
4007 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
4008 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
4009
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00004010- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
4011
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004012Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004013-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004014
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00004015- Added three operators to the operator module:
4016 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
4017 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
4018 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
4019
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00004020- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
4021
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00004022- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
4023 archives.
4024
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004025- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
4026 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
4027 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
4028
4029 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
4030
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004031- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
4032 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
4033 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00004034 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004035
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00004036- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
4037 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
4038 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
4039 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00004040 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
4041 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
4042 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
4043 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00004044
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00004045- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
4046 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00004047
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00004048- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
4049
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00004050- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
4051 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
4052
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00004053- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
4054 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
4055 supported.
4056
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00004057- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
4058
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00004059- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
4060 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00004061
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00004062- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
4063 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
4064
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00004065- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
4066
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004067- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
4068 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
4069
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00004070- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
4071 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
4072 functions but callable type objects.
4073
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004074- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004075 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004076 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004077
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004078- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4079 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004080
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004081- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4082 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004083
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004084- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4085 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4086 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4087 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4088
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004089- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4090 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004091
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004092- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4093 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4094 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4095 and __imul__.
4096
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004097- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004098 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4099 is called.
4100
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004101- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4102 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4103 interpreter was compiled.
4104
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004105- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4106 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4107 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004108 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004109 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4110 1, not 2.
4111
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004112- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4113 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4114 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4115 limit.
4116
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004117- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4118 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4119 bug #623464.
4120
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004121- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4122 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4123 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4124 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4125
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004126Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004127-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004128
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004129- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4130
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004131- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4132 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4133 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4134 with Python 2.3a2.
4135
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004136- os.path exposes getctime.
4137
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004138- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004139 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004140 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004141 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004142 unit tests of floating point results.
4143
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004144- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4145 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4146 has been increased.
4147
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004148- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4149 executed.
4150
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004151- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4152 postinstallation script.
4153
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004154- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4155 test the current module.
4156
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004157- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004158 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4159 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4160 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4161 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4162
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004163- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004164 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004165 Ward's Optik package.
4166
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004167- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4168 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4169 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4170 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4171
4172- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4173 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004174 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004175
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004176- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4177 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4178 shelf are binary pickles.
4179
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004180- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4181 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4182
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004183- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4184 modules are iterators now.
4185
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004186- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4187 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4188 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4189 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4190 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4191 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004192
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004193- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4194 with their entity value.
4195
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004196- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4197
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004198- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4199 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004200
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004201- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4202 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004203 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004204
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004205- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4206 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4207 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4208 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4209 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4210 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4211 main():
4212
4213 import locale
4214 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4215
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004216- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4217 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4218
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004219- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4220 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4221 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4222 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4223 to the new standard.
4224
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004225- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4226 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4227 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4228 an extension to the database.
4229
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004230- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4231 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4232 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4233 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004234 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004235
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004236- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004237 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004238
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004239- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4240 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4241 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4242 bounded integers.
4243
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004244- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4245 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4246 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4247 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4248 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4249 in existence.
4250
4251 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4252 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4253 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4254 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4255 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4256 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4257
4258 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4259 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4260 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4261 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4262
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004263- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4264 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4265 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4266
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004267- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4268
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004269- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4270 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4271 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4272 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4273
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004274- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4275 argument.
4276
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004277- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4278 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4279 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4280 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4281 [SF patch 560794].
4282
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004283- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4284 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4285 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004286 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4287 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4288 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004289
4290- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4291 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004292
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004293- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4294 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4295 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4296 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004297
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004298- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4299 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4300 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4301 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4302 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4303
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004304- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004305
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004306- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4307
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004308- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4309 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4310 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4311 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4312 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4313 identical to None.
4314
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004315- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4316 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4317 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4318 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4319 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4320 results now.
4321
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004322- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4323 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4324
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004325- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4326 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4327 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4328 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4329 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4330 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4331 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4332 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4333
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004334- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4335
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004336- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4337 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4338
4339- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4340 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4341 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4342 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4343 and other systems.
4344
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004345- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4346 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4347 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4348 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 +00004349 work well with these.
4350
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004351- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4352
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004353- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004354 connections.
4355
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004356- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4357 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4358 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4359
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004360- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4361 sets
4362
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004363- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4364 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4365 name.
4366
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004367- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4368 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4369 passed in.
4370
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004371- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004372 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004373 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4374 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004375
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004376- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4377
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004378- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4379
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004380- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4381 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4382 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4383
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004384- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4385 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4386 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4387 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004388 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004389
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004390- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004391 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004392 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004393
4394- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4395 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4396 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4397
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004398- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004399 the value of its expression argument.
4400
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004401- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4402 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4403 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4404
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004405- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4406 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4407 skipstone browser was included.
4408
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004409- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4410 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4411
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004412Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004413-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004414
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004415- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4416 names in addition to accepting file names.
4417
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004418- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4419 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4420 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4421 still used and useful.)
4422
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004423- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4424 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4425 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4426 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004427
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004428- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4429 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4430 the generated binary.
4431
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004432Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004433-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004434
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004435- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4436
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004437- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4438 except in the hands of experts.
4439
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004440- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004441 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4442 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4443 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004444
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004445- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4446 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4447 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4448 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4449 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4450 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4451 builds.
4452
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004453- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4454 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4455 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4456 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4457 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4458 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4459 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4460 new type.
4461
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004462- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004463
4464 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4465 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4466 positive infinities.
4467
4468 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4469 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4470 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4471 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4472 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4473 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4474 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4475
4476 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4477
4478 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4479
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004480- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4481 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4482 size of the executable.
4483
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004484- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4485 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4486 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4487 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004488
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004489- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4490
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004491- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4492 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4493 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004494
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004495- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4496 well as Unix.
4497
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004498- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4499 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4500 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4501 modules in the README file for details.
4502
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004503C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004504-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004505
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004506- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4507 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004508 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004509 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004510 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004511
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004512- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4513 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4514 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4515 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4516 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4517 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004518 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004519 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4520 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4521 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4522 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4523 aligned.)
4524
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004525- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4526 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4527 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4528
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004529- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4530 level.
4531
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004532- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4533 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4534 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4535 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4536 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4537
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004538- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4539 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4540 code.
4541
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004542- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4543 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4544 adjusting for negative indices.
4545
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004546- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4547 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4548 object.
4549
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004550- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4551 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4552 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4553
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004554- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4555 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004556
4557- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4558
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004559- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4560 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4561 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4562 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4563
4564- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4565
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004566- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004567
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004568- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004569 without going through the buffer API.
4570
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004571- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004572
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004573- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4574 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4575 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4576 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4577
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004578- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4579 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4580
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004581- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004582 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4583
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004584New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004585-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004586
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004587- OpenVMS is now supported.
4588
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004589- AtheOS is now supported.
4590
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004591- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4592
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004593- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4594
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004595Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004596-----
4597
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004598- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4599 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4600 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004601
4602Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004603-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004604
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004605- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4606 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4607 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4608 bugs.
4609 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004610 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004611 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4612 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004613 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004614
4615- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004616 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004617
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004618- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4619 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4620
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004621- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4622 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004623 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004624 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4625
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004626- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4627 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4628 use files" uninstall option).
4629
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004630- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4631
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004632- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4633 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4634
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004635- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4636 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4637 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4638
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004639- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4640 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4641 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4642 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4643 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004644 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4645 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4646 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004647
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004648- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004649 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004650 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4651 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4652 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4653 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4654 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4655 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4656 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4657 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4658 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4659 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4660 work around.
4661
4662- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4663 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4664 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4665 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4666 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4667 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4668 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4669 specified with O_CREAT too).
4670
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004671Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004672----
4673
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004674- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004675
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004676- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4677 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4678 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4679
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004680- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4681 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4682 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4683
4684- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4685 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4686 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4687 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4688 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4689 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4690 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4691 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004692
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004693- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4694 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4695 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004696
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004697- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4698 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4699 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4700 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4701 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004702
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004703- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4704 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4705 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004706
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004707- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4708 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004709
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004710- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4711 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4712 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4713 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4714 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004715
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004716- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4717 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4718 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4719
4720- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4721 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4722 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004723
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004724- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4725 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4726 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4727 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004728 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004729
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004730- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4731 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004732
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004733- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4734 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004735
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004736- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004737 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004738 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4739 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004740
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004741
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004742What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004743===============================
4744
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004745*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4746
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004747Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004748--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004749
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004750- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4751 with a custom metaclass.
4752
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004753Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004754-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004755
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004756- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4757 are proxies.
4758
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004759Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004760-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004761
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004762- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4763 very short strings.
4764
4765- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4766 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4767 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4768 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4769 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4770
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004771Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004772-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004773
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004774- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4775 close or delete time).
4776
4777- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4778 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4779
4780- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4781
4782- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004783 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004784
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004785Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004786-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004787
4788Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004789-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004790
4791C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004792-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004793
4794New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004795-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004796
4797Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004798-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004799
4800Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004801-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004802
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004803- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4804
4805- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4806 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4807
4808- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4809 deleted at process exit time.
4810
4811- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4812 in backslash.
4813
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004814Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004815----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004816
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004817- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4818 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4819 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4820
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004821
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004822What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004823===========================
4824
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004825*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4826
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004827Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004828--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004829
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004830- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4831 been extensively updated. See
4832
4833 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4834
4835 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4836
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004837- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4838 deleted!
4839
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004840- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4841 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4842 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4843 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4844 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4845
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004846- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4847
4848 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4849 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4850
4851 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4852 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4853 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4854 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4855 supported anyway.
4856
4857 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4858 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4859
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004860- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4861 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4862 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4863 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4864 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004865
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004866- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4867 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4868 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4869
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004870Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004871-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004872
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004873- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4874 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4875 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4876 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4877 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4878 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004879 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4880 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4881 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4882 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004883
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004884- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4885 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4886 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4887
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004888Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004889-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004890
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004891- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4892
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004893Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004894-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004895
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004896- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4897 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4898 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4899 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4900 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4901 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4902
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004903- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4904
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004905- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4906
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004907- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4908
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004909- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4910 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4911 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4912
4913- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4914
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004915Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004916-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004917
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004918- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4919 off a search on Google.
4920
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004921Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004922-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004923
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004924- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4925 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4926 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4927 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4928 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4929 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4930 other platforms should do likewise.
4931
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004932- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4933 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4934 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4935
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004936C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004937-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004938
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004939- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4940 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4941 producing key-value pairs.
4942
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004943- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004944 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004945 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4946 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4947 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4948 previously went unchallenged.
4949
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004950New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004951-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004952
4953Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004954-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004955
4956Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004957-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004958
4959Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004960----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004961
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004962- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4963 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004964
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004965- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4966 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4967 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4968 home.
4969
4970
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004971What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004972===========================
4973
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004974*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4975
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004976Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004977--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004978
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004979- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4980 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004981
4982 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004983 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004984
4985 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4986 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004987 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004988 This needs to be documented.
4989
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004990- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4991 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4992
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004993- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4994 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4995 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4996
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004997- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4998 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4999
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005000- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
5001 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
5002 class forbids it).
5003
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00005004- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
5005 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
5006 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
5007
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005008- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
5009
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005010Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005011-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005012
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005013- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
5014 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005015 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005016
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005017- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
5018 (like 1 + '').
5019
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005020Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005021-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005022
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005023- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
5024 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
5025 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
5026 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005027 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005028 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
5029
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00005030- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
5031 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
5032 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
5033 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
5034
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005035- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
5036 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005037 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
5038 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
5039 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005040
5041- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
5042 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005043
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00005044- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
5045 bytes on its input.
5046
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005047Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005048-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005049
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005050- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00005051 convenience function.
5052
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005053- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
5054 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
5055 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005056 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
5057 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
5058 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
5059 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
5060 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
5061 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005062
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00005063- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
5064 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
5065 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
5066 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
5067
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00005068- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
5069 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
5070 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
5071
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005072- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
5073 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
5074 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
5075 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5076
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005077- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5078 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005079 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005080 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5081 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5082 new -l and -e options.
5083
5084- statcache is now deprecated.
5085
5086- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5087 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005088 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005089 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5090 time properly taken into account.
5091
5092- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5093 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5094 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5095 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5096
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005097Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005098-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005099
5100Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005101-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005102
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005103- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5104 is built with libdb3 if available.
5105
5106- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5107
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005108C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005109-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005110
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005111- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5112 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5113 PySequence_Size().
5114
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005115- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5116
5117- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5118 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5119 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5120
5121- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5122 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5123
5124- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5125 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5126
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005127New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005128-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005129
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005130- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5131 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5132
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005133- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5134 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5135
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005136- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5137
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005138Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005139-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005140
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005141- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5142 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5143
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005144Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005145-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005146
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005147Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005148----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005149
5150- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5151 removed completely in the next release.
5152
5153- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5154 OSX.
5155
5156- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5157 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5158
5159- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5160
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005161
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005162What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005163===========================
5164
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005165*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5166
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005167Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005168--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005169
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005170- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005171 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005172 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005173 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5174 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005175 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5176 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005177 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5178 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005179
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005180- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5181 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5182
5183- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5184 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5185
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005186Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005187-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005188
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005189- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5190 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5191 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5192 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5193 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5194 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5195 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5196 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5197
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005198- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5199 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5200 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5201 example).
5202
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005203- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005204 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005205 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005206 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005207
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005208- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5209 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5210 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005211 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005212
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005213- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5214 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5215 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5216 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5217 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5218 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5219
5220 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5221
5222 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5223
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005224Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005225-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005226
5227- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5228
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005229- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5230
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005231- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5232 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005233
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005234- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5235 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5236 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5237 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5238 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5239 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005240 attributes.
5241
5242- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5243 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5244 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005245
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005246- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5247 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5248 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005249
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005250- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5251 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5252 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005253 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5254 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5255
5256- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5257 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005258
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005259Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005260-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005261
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005262- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5263 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5264
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005265- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5266 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5267 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5268 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5269
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005270- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5271 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5272 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5273 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5274
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005275 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5276 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5277 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5278 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5279 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5280 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5281 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5282 without losing information).
5283
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005284- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005285 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5286 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5287 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5288 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5289 module).
5290
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005291 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005292 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5293 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5294 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5295 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005296
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005297- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005298 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5299 encoding.
5300
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005301- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5302 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5303
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005304- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005305 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5306
5307- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5308 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5309 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5310 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5311
5312- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5313
5314- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5315 ON, and OFF.
5316
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005317- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5318 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5319
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005320Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005321-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005322
5323- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5324 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5325 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005326
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005327- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5328 been added: -X and -E.
5329
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005330Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005331-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005332
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005333- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5334 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5335
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005336C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005337-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005338
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005339- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5340 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5341 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5342 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5343 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5344
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005345- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5346 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5347 as long) arguments.
5348
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005349- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5350 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5351 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5352 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5353 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5354 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5355
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005356- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5357 input.
5358
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005359New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005360-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005361
5362Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005363-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005364
5365Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005366-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005367
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005368- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5369 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5370 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5371
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005372- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5373 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5374 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005375 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005376
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005377 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5378 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5379 import signal
5380 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005381
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005382 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005383 while 1:
5384 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005385 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005386 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5387 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5388 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5389 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005390
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005391
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005392What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5393===========================
5394
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005395*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5396
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005397Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005398--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005399
5400- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5401 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5402 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5403
5404- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5405 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5406 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5407 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5408 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5409 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5410 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005411
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005412- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005413 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005414 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5415 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5416 associate a docstring with a property.
5417
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005418- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5419 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5420 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5421 other built-in object types.
5422
5423- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5424 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5425 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5426 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5427 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5428
5429- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5430 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5431
5432- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5433 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005434 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005435 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5436 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5437 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5438 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5439 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5440
5441- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5442 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5443 class.
5444
5445- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5446 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5447 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5448 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5449
5450- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5451 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5452 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5453 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5454
5455- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5456 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5457
5458- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5459 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5460 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5461 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5462 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005463 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005464 with the same value as s.
5465
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005466- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5467
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005468Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005469----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005470
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005471- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5472
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005473- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5474 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5475 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5476 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5477 objects.
5478
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005479- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5480 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005481 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5482 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5483
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005484- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5485 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5486 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5487
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005488Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005489-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005490
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005491- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5492 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5493 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5494 by the instances.
5495
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005496- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5497 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5498 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5499
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005500- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5501 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5502 before the entire comparison is complete.
5503
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005504- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5505 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5506 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5507
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005508- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5509 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5510 getwriter().
5511
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005512- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5513 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5514
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005515- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005516 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5517 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5518
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005519- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5520 iterable object.
5521
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005522- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5523 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005524
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005525- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5526 authentication.
5527
5528- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5529 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005530
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005531- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005532 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5533 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5534 a sample driver.)
5535
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005536Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005537-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005538
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005539- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5540 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5541 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5542 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5543 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5544 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5545 kernel has large file support.
5546
5547- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5548 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5549 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5550 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5551 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5552
5553- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5554 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5555 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5556
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005557C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005558-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005559
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005560- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5561 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5562
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005563New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005564-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005565
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005566- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5567 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5568
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005569Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005570-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005571
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005572- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5573 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5574 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5575 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5576 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5577
5578- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5579 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5580 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5581 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5582
5583- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5584 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5585
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005586Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005587-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005588
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005589- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005590 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5591 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005592
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005593
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005594What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5595===========================
5596
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005597*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5598
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005599Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005600----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005601
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005602- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5603 big to represent as a C double.
5604
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005605- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5606 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5607 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5608 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5609 restriction).
5610
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005611- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5612 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5613 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5614 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5615 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5616
5617 >>> dir([])
5618 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5619 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5620 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5621 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5622 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5623 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5624 'reverse', 'sort']
5625
5626 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5627
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005628- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005629 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5630 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5631 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5632 OverflowError exception.
5633
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005634- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005635 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005636 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5637 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5638 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5639 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5640 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005641 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005642 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5643 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5644
5645 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5646 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5647 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5648 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005649
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005650- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005651 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5652 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5653 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5654 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5655 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5656 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5657 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5658 once it is created.
5659
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005660- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5661 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5662 (key, value) pairs.
5663
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005664- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005665 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5666 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5667
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005668- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5669 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5670 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5671 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5672 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005673
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005674- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005675 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5676 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5677
5678 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5679
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005680- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005681 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5682
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005683Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005684-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005685
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005686- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005687 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5688 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005689
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005690- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5691 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5692 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5693 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5694 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5695 in this area anymore).
5696
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005697- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5698 threading.Timer.
5699
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005700- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5701 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5702
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005703- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005704 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5705
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005706- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005707 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5708 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5709 converted to Python longs.
5710
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005711- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005712 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5713
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005714- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5715 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5716 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5717
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005718Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005719-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005720
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005721- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5722 division operators as per PEP 238.
5723
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005724Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005725-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005726
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005727- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5728 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5729 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5730 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5731
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005732C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005733-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005734
5735- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005736
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005737- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5738 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005739 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005740
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005741 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5742 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005743 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005744 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005745
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005746- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005747 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5748 module:
5749
5750 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005751
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005752 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5753 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005754
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005755 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5756 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005757
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005758 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5759
5760 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5761
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005762- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005763 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5764 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5765 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005766
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005767New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005768-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005769
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005770- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5771 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5772 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5773 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5774 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005775
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005776Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005777-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005778
5779Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005780-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005781
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005782- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5783 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5784 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5785 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005786 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5787 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5788 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5789 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5790 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005791
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005792- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005793 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5794
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005795
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005796What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5797===========================
5798
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005799*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5800
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005801Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005802-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005803
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005804- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5805 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5806
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005807- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5808 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5809 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005810
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005811- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5812 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5813 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5814 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005815
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005816- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5817
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005818- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005819
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005820Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005821-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005822
5823- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005824 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005825 the module docstring for details.
5826
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005827Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005828-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005829
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005830- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005831 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5832 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5833 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005834
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005835- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5836 Nick Mathewson.
5837
5838Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005839----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005840
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005841- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5842 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5843 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5844 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5845 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5846 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5847 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5848 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5849
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005850- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5851 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5852 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5853 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5854
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005855- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5856 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5857 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5858 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5859 come a long way).
5860
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005861- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5862 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5863 write filters for these warnings).
5864
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005865- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5866 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5867 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5868 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5869 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5870
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005871- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5872 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5873 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5874 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5875 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5876 older distribution.
5877
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005878Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005879-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005880
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005881- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5882 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005883 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005884
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005885- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5886 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5887 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5888
5889- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5890
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005891- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5892
5893- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5894
5895- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5896
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005897- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005898
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005899- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5900
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005901New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005902-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005903
5904C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005905-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005906
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005907- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5908 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5909 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5910 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5911 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5912 against buffer overruns.
5913
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005914- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005915 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5916 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005917 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5918 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5919 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5920
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005921- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5922 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5923 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5924 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5925 deprecated.
5926
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005927Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005928-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005929
5930- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5931 relevant is found.
5932
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005933
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005934What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005935===========================
5936
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005937*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5938
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005939Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005940----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005941
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005942- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5943 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5944 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5945 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5946 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5947 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5948 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5949 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005950 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005951 repaired.
5952
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005953- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005954 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005955 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5956 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5957 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5958 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5959 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5960 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5961 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5962 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5963
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005964- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5965 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5966 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5967 leading BMO character).
5968
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005969- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5970 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5971 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5972
5973 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5974 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5975 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005976
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005977 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5978 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5979 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5980 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5981 for various simple to use conversions.
5982
5983 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5984 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5985
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005986 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5987 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5988 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5989 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5990 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5991 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5992 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5993 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5994 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5995 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5996 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5997 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5998 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5999 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
6000 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006001
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006002- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
6003 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
6004 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006005 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006006 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006007
6008 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006009 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
6010 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
6011 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
6012 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
6013 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006014 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
6015 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006016
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006017 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
6018 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
6019 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006020 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006021
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00006022- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
6023 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
6024 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
6025 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
6026 floating arithmetic,
6027
6028 x = 9007199254740992.0
6029 print long(x)
6030
6031 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
6032 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
6033 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
6034 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
6035 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
6036 functions are of good quality).
6037
6038 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
6039 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
6040 algorithms to break.
6041
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00006042- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
6043 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
6044 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
6045 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
6046 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
6047 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
6048 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
6049 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
6050 order.
6051
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006052- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
6053 operation along the most common code paths.
6054
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006055- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
6056 the same as dict.has_key(x).
6057
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00006058- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
6059 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
6060 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
6061 {}.update(UserDict())
6062
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006063- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
6064 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
6065 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
6066 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
6067 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
6068 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
6069 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
6070 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
6071
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006072- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00006073 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006074
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006075 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006076 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6077 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006078 join() method of strings
6079 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006080 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6081 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006082 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006083 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006084
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006085- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6086 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6087
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006088- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6089 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6090
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006091- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6092 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6093 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6094 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6095
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006096- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6097 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006098 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006099 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6100 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006101
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006102- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6103
6104
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006105Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006106-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006107
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006108- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006109 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006110 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6111 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6112
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006113- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6114 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6115
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006116- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6117 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6118 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6119 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6120
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006121- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6122 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6123 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6124
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006125- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6126
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006127- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6128
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006129- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6130 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6131 that are still imported into string.py).
6132
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006133- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6134
6135- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6136 Now it does.
6137
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006138- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6139
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006140- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6141 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6142 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6143 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6144 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006145 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6146 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006147
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006148- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6149 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6150 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6151 'help(object)'.
6152
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006153Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006154-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006155
6156- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006157 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006158 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6159 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6160
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006161- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006162 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6163 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006164
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006165C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006166-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006167
6168- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6169 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006170
6171----
6172
6173**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**