blob: ae0f2d92da5214c73ee6e6a8c5d720c2cee21849 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwis18e16552006-02-15 17:27:45 +000015- PEP 353: Using ssize_t as the index type.
16
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000017- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
18 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
19 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
20
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000021- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
22 configure would break checking curses.h.
23
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000024- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
25 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
26
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000027- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
28
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000029- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
30
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000031- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
32
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000033- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
34 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
35
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000036- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
37 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
38 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
39
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000040- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
41 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000042 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000043
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000044- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
45 now encodes backslash correctly.
46
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000047- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
48
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000049- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
50 and long longs.
51
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000052- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
53 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
54 message in this case.
55
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000056- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
57 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
58 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
59 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
60 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
61
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000062- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000063
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000064- Speed up some Unicode operations.
65
66- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
67
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000068- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000069 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
70
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000071- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
72
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000073- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
74 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
75
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000076- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
77
78- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
79
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000080- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
81 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
82 was empty.
83
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000084- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
85 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
86
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000087- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000088 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000089
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000090- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
91 codes.
92
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000093- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
94 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
95 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
96
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000097- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
98 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
99
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +0000100- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +0000101 (fixes bug #1119418).
102
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000103- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
104
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000105- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
106 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
107
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000108- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
109 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
110 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
111
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000112- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
113
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000114- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
115 reference counts in some error exit cases.
116
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000117- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
118 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
119 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
120 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
121 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
122 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
123 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
124 realloc.
125
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000126- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
127 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
128
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000129- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
130 like their int counterparts.
131
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000132- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
133 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
134 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
135 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
136 for a longer write-up of the problem).
137
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000138- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
139 serializing floats.
140
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000141- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
142 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
143 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
144
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000145- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
146 278.
147
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000148- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
149 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
150 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
151 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000152 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000153 PyNumber_*().
154 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
155
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000156- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
157 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
158 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
159 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
160
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000161- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
162 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
163 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
164 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
165 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
166
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000167- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
168 disabled caused a crash.
169
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000170- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
171 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
172
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000173- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000174 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
175
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000176- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
177
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000178- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000179 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
180 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
181 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000182
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000183- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
184
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000185- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
186 returning None.
187
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000188- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000189 ('\') with a specific error message.
190
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000191- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
192
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000193- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
194 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
195
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000196- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000197 an ferror() call.
198
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000199- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
200 list.sort().
201
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000202- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
203 (2+3) --> (5).
204
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000205- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
206
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000207- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
208 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000209
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000210- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
211 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
212 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
213
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000214- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
215 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
216 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
217
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000218Extension Modules
219-----------------
220
Georg Brandlf4f44152006-02-18 22:29:33 +0000221- Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify
222 a "command verb" to invoke on the file.
223
Neal Norwitz082b2df2006-02-07 07:04:46 +0000224- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
225 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
226
Neal Norwitz0e6bc8c2006-02-05 05:45:43 +0000227- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
228 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
229 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
230
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000231- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
232 than the system default domain.
233
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000234- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
235 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
236 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
237
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000238- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
239
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000240- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
241 before the env.
242
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000243- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
244
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000245- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
246
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000247- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
248 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
249 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
250
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000251- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
252 without prior setting of the userptr.
253
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000254- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
255
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000256- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
257
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000258- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
259 problem on AIX.
260
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000261- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
262
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000263- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
264
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000265- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
266
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000267- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
268 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
269
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000270- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
271 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
272
273- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
274
275- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000276
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000277- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
278 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
279
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000280- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
281
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000282- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
283 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
284
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000285- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
286 returns in cStringIO.c.
287
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000288- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
289 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
290
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000291- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
292
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000293- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
294
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000295- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
296 the file system encoding.
297
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000298- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
299 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000300
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000301- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
302
303- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000304 line without newlines.
305
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000306- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
307 on Windows.
308
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000309- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000310 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
311
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000312- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
313 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
314 for large or negative values.
315
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000316- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000317 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000318
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000319- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
320
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000321- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
322 if available on the platform.
323
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000324- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
325 available on the platform.
326
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000327- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
328 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
329
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000330- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
331
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000332- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
333 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
334 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
335
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000336- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
337
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000338- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
339 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
340
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000341- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000342 file size.
343
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000344- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
345
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000346- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
347 {remove_history,replace_history}
348
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000349- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
350 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000351
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000352- stat_float_times is now True.
353
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000354- array.array objects are now picklable.
355
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000356- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
357 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
358
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000359- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
360 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
361 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
362
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000363- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
364 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000365
366Library
367-------
368
Georg Brandlc029f872006-02-19 14:12:34 +0000369- Patch #1212287: fileinput.input() now has a mode parameter for
370 specifying the file mode input files should be opened with.
371
Georg Brandl67e9fb92006-02-19 13:56:17 +0000372- Patch #1215184: fileinput now has a fileno() function for getting the
373 current file number.
374
Georg Brandl602b9ba2006-02-19 13:26:36 +0000375- Patch #1349274: gettext.install() now optionally installs additional
376 translation functions other than _() in the builtin namespace.
377
Georg Brandle4662172006-02-19 09:51:27 +0000378- Patch #1337756: fileinput now accepts Unicode filenames.
379
Georg Brandl7b4e7c22006-02-18 21:10:56 +0000380- Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
381 two gigabytes.
382
Georg Brandl21dd1af2006-02-17 13:35:13 +0000383- Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
384
Georg Brandlbd3bc4d2006-02-17 09:52:53 +0000385- Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
386 return address using smtplib.
387
Georg Brandl0e1abe22006-02-17 09:48:14 +0000388- Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
389 in pydoc.
Georg Brandl501dd0d2006-02-17 09:45:40 +0000390
Martin v. Löwis00756902006-02-05 17:09:41 +0000391- Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
392 unless the system is Win32.
393
Martin v. Löwisc81e3a62006-01-30 15:04:31 +0000394- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000395 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
396 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
397
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000398- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
399
400- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000401
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000402- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
403
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000404- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000405 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000406
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000407- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
408 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000409
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000410- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
411
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000412- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
413
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000414- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
415 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
416 LoadError subclasses IOError.
417
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000418- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000419 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
420 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
421 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
422 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
423
424 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
425 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
426 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
427 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
428 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000429
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000430- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
431 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
432 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
433
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000434- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
435
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000436- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
437
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000438- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
439 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
440 illegal argument)
441
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000442- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
443 is an error in the format string.
444
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000445- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
446
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000447- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000448 "parent" argument.
449
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000450- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
451 for padding.
452
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000453- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
454 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
455
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000456- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
457 to get the correct encoding.
458
459- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
460 languages.
461
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000462- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
463
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000464- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
465
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000466- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
467
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000468- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
469 functionality.
470
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000471- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
472
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000473- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
474 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
475
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000476- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
477 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
478 match the Content-Length header.
479
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000480- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
481
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000482- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
483 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000484 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000485
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000486- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
487
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000488- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
489
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000490- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
491 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
492
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000493- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
494 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
495 Tkdnd.
496
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000497- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
498 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
499
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000500- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
501 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
502
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000503- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000504 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
505
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000506- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
507 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
508
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000509- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
510 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
511
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000512- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000513 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000514
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000515- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
516
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000517- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
518 error messages.
519
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000520- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
521
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000522- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
523 Bug #1224621.
524
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000525- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
526 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
527 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
528 terminates by raising StopIteration.
529
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000530- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
531
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000532- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
533 component of the path.
534
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000535- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
536 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
537 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
538 class at all.
539
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000540- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
541 files to PyPI.
542
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000543- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
544 them to PyPI.
545
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000546- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
547 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
548 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
549 work as expected.
550
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000551- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
552 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
553
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000554- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000555 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
556
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000557- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
558
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000559- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
560 to build.
561
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000562- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
563 symbolic links on Windows.
564
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000565- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000566 profile.py if available.
567
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000568- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
569
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000570- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
571 in LWPCookieJar.
572
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000573- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
574
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000575- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
576
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000577- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
578
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000579- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
580
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000581- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
582
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000583- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
584
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000585- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
586
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000587- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
588
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000589- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
590 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
591 be exploited in various ways.
592
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000593- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000594 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
595
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000596- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
597 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
598
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000599- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000600 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
601
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000602- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
603
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000604- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
605
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000606- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
607
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000608- Enhancements to the csv module:
609
610 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000611 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000612 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000613 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
614 reporting.
615 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
616 dictates.
617 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000618 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000619 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000620 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
621 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000622 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
623 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000624 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000625 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
626 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
627 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
628 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
629 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
630 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
631 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
632 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
633 without first creating a dialect class.
634 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
635 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
636 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000637 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000638 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
639 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000640 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
641 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
642 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
643 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000644 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
645 This has been fixed.
646
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000647- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
648 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
649 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
650 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
651
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000652- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
653
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000654- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
655 (Bug #951915).
656
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000657- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
658 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
659 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000660 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000661
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000662- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
663
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000664- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
665 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
666
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000667- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
668
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000669- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
670
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000671- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
672
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000673- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
674
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000675- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
676
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000677- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
678 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
679 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
680
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000681- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000682 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000683
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000684- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
685 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
686 tokenizer with very long source lines.
687
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000688- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
689 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
690 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000691
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000692- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
693 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000694
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000695- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
696 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
697
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000698- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
699 correctly.
700
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000701- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
702 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
703 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
704 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
705 between two lines.
706
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000707- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
708 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
709 handlers.
710
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000711- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000712 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
713 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000714
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000715- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
716 considering it exactly like a '*'.
717
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000718- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
719 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000720
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000721- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
722
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000723- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
724 touch the recursion limit.
725
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000726Build
727-----
728
Martin v. Löwis86d66262006-02-17 08:40:11 +0000729- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
730
Martin v. Löwis856bf9a2006-02-14 20:42:55 +0000731- Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
732
Martin v. Löwisa55e55e2006-02-11 15:55:14 +0000733- Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
734
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000735- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
736
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000737- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
738 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
739
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000740- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
741
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000742- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
743 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
744
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000745- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
746 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
747
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000748- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
749 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
750 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000751 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000752
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000753- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
754 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
755 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
756
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000757- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
758
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000759- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
760 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
761
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000762- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
763 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
764 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
765 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
766 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
767 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
768 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
769 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
770
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000771- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
772 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
773 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
774 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
775
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000776C API
777-----
778
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000779- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
780
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000781- Removed PyRange_New().
782
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000783- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
784 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
785 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
786 mappings.
787
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000788
789Tests
790-----
791
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000792- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000793
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000794- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
795 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
796
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000797
798Documentation
799-------------
800
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000801- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
802
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000803- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
804 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
805
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000806- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
807
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000808- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
809
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000810- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
811
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000812- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
813
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000814- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
815
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000816- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
817
818- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
819
820- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
821
822- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
823
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000824- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
825 Closes bug #1166582.
826
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000827- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
828 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
829 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
830
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000831Mac
832---
833
834
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000835New platforms
836-------------
837
838- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
839
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000840
841Tools/Demos
842-----------
843
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000844- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
845 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
846 source files that need an encoding declaration.
847 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
848
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000849- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
850
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000851- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000852
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000853- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
854 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000855
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000856What's New in Python 2.4 final?
857===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000858
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000859*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000860
861Core and builtins
862-----------------
863
864- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
865 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
866 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
867
868
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000869What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
870==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000871
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000872*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000873
874Core and builtins
875-----------------
876
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000877- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
878 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
879 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
880
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000881
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000882Library
883-------
884
885- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
886 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
887 raised is re-raised.
888
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000889- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
890 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
891
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000892- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
893 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
894 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
895 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
896 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
897 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
898 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
899 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
900 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
901 by the slice are recomputed now.
902
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000903- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000904
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000905Build
906-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000907
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000908- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
909 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
910 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000911
912C API
913-----
914
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000915- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
916
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000917
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000918What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
919================================
920
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000921*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000922
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000923License
924-------
925
926The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
927is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
928changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
929Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
930intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
931durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
932the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
933License::
934
935 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
936
937says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
938to Python 2.1.1.
939
940The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
941License Version 2.
942
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000943Core and builtins
944-----------------
945
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000946- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
947 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
948 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
949 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
950 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
951 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
952 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000953 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000954 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
955 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
956
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000957- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000958
959Extension Modules
960-----------------
961
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000962- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
963 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
964 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
965 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000966
967Library
968-------
969
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000970- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
971 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
972 returned.
973
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000974- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
975
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000976- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
977 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
978
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000979- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
980
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000981- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
982 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000983
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000984- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
985
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000986- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
987
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000988- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000989 the source code is updated and reloaded.
990
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000991Build
992-----
993
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000994- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000995
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000996What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
997================================
998
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000999*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001000
1001Core and builtins
1002-----------------
1003
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001004- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +00001005 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
1006
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +00001007- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
1008 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
1009 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
1010 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
1011
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001012- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
1013 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
1014
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +00001015- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
1016 constant.
1017
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001018- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
1019 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
1020 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
1021 large), and to anomalies such as
1022 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
1023 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
1024 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
1025 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001026
1027Extension modules
1028-----------------
1029
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +00001030- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
1031 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001032 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
1033 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
1034 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001035
1036Library
1037-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001038
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001039- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001040 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001041 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
1042 --swig-cpp.
1043
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001044- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1045 it is set.
1046
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001047- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001048
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001049- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1050 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1051 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1052 Closes bug #1039270.
1053
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001054- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001055
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001056 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001057 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1058 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1059 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1060 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1061 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1062 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1063 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1064 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1065 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1066 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1067 + Updates to documentation.
1068
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001069- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1070 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1071 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1072 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1073
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001074- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001075
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001076- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1077 applications should use the getmember function.
1078
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001079- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1080
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001081- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1082 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1083 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1084 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1085 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1086 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1087 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1088 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1089 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1090
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001091- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1092 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001093 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001094
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001095- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1096 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1097 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1098 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1099 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1100 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1101 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1102 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001103
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001104- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1105 the new public features (of which there are many).
1106
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001107- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001108 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1109 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1110 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1111 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001112 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001113
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001114- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1115
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001116- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1117 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1118 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1119 options.
1120
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001121- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1122 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1123 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1124 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1125 conditions under which non-string values work.
1126
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001127Build
1128-----
1129
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001130- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1131 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1132 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1133
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001134- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1135 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1136 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1137 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1138 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001139
1140C API
1141-----
1142
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001143- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1144 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1145
1146- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1147
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001148- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1149 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1150 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1151 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1152 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1153 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1154 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1155 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1156 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1157
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001158- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1159
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001160- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1161 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1162 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001163
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001164Tests
1165-----
1166
1167- test__locale ported to unittest
1168
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001169Mac
1170---
1171
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001172- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1173 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1174 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001175
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001176Tools/Demos
1177-----------
1178
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001179- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1180 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1181 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1182 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1183 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001184
1185
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001186What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1187=================================
1188
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001189*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001190
1191Core and builtins
1192-----------------
1193
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001194- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001195 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1196
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001197- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1198 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1199 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1200 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1201 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1202 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1203 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1204 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001205 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1206 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1207 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1208 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1209 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001210
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001211- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1212 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1213 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1214 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1215 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1216
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001217- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1218
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001219- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1220 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1221
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001222- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1223 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1224 modified the list.
1225
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001226- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1227 functions is now writable.
1228
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001229- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1230 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1231 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1232 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1233
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001234- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1235 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1236 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1237 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1238 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001239
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001240- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1241 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1242
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001243Extension modules
1244-----------------
1245
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001246- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1247
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001248- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1249 data.
1250
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001251- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1252 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1253 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1254 supposed to have been truncated away.
1255
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001256- Added socket.socketpair().
1257
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001258- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1259 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1260
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001261- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001262 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1263
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001264Library
1265-------
1266
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001267- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001268 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001269
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001270- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1271 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1272
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001273- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1274 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1275
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001276- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1277
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001278- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1279 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001280
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001281- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1282 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1283
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001284- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1285
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001286- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1287
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001288- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1289
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001290- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1291 Percivall.
1292
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001293- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1294 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1295
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001296- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1297 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1298 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001299 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001300
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001301- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1302 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1303 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1304 and exponent.
1305
1306- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1307
1308- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001309 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001310 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1311
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001312- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1313 to the readline module.
1314
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001315- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001316 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1317 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001318
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001319- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1320 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1321 contains symlinks.
1322
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001323- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1324 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1325
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001326- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1327 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1328 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1329
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001330- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1331 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1332 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1333 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1334 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1335 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1336 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1337 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1338 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1339 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1340 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1341 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1342 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1343
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001344- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1345
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001346Tools/Demos
1347-----------
1348
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001349- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1350 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1351
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001352- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1353
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001354Build
1355-----
1356
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001357- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1358 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1359 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1360 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1361 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1362 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1363 plans to do so.
1364
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001365- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1366 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1367
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001368- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1369 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1370
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001371- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1372 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1373
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001374- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1375 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1376
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001377- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1378 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1379
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001380C API
1381-----
1382
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001383..
1384
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001385Documentation
1386-------------
1387
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001388- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1389 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1390
1391- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1392 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1393 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001394
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001395New platforms
1396-------------
1397
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001398- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1399
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001400Tests
1401-----
1402
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001403..
1404
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001405Windows
1406-------
1407
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001408- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1409 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1410 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1411 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1412 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1413 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1414 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1415 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1416 the problem.
1417
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001418Mac
1419---
1420
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001421..
1422
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001423
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001424What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1425=================================
1426
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001427*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001428
1429Core and builtins
1430-----------------
1431
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001432- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1433 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1434 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1435 sensitive code.
1436
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001437- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001438 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001439
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001440 @staticmethod
1441 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001442
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001443 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001444
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001445- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1446 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1447 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1448 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1449 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1450 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1451 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1452 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1453 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1454 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1455 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1456
1457 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1458 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1459 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1460 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1461 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1462 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1463 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1464
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001465- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1466 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1467
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001468- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001469 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001470
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001471- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001472 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001473 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1474
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001475- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001476 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1477 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1478
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001479- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1480 types that support garbage collection.
1481
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001482- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1483
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001484- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1485 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1486 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1487 Jython.
1488
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001489- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1490
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001491- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1492 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1493
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001494- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1495 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1496 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001497
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001498- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1499 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1500 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1501
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001502Extension modules
1503-----------------
1504
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001505- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1506
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001507Library
1508-------
1509
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001510- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1511 TIS-620
1512
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001513- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1514 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1515 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1516 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1517 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1518 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1519 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1520 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1521 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1522 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1523
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001524- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1525
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001526- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1527 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1528 same as when the argument is omitted).
1529 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1530
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001531- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1532
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001533- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1534 schemes are offered.
1535
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001536- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1537
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001538- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1539 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1540 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1541
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001542- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1543
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001544- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1545 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1546
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001547- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1548 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1549 when dummy_threading is being used.
1550
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001551- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1552 from a tarfile.
1553
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001554- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001555 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001556
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001557- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1558 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1559 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1560 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1561
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001562- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1563 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1564
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001565- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1566 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1567 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1568 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1569 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1570 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1571 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1572 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1573 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1574 by some other method in progress).
1575
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001576- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1577 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1578 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001579
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001580- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1581
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001582- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1583 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1584 AM Kuchling.
1585
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001586- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1587 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1588 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1589
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001590- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1591 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1592 instead of unsigned.
1593
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001594- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001595 no longer part of the public API.
1596
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001597- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1598 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1599 string methods of the same name).
1600
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001601- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001602 SF patch 945642.
1603
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001604- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1605
1606 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1607
1608 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1609 DocTestSuites.
1610
1611- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1612 that provide thread-local data.
1613
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001614- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1615 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1616
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001617- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1618
1619- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1620 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1621 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1622
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001623- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1624
1625 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1626 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1627 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001628
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001629 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1630 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1631 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1632 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1633
1634 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1635 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1636
1637 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1638 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1639 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1640 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1641
1642 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1643 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1644 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1645 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1646 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1647
1648 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1649 wrapping help output.
1650
1651 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1652 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1653 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001654
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001655C API
1656-----
1657
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001658- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1659 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1660 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1661 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1662 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1663 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1664 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1665 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1666 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1667 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1668 its visible semantics have not changed.
1669
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001670- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1671 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1672
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001673Documentation
1674-------------
1675
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001676- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001677
1678 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001679 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001680
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001681 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001682
1683 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1684
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001685- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001686
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001687Tests
1688-----
1689
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001690- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001691 platforms that use the Makefile.
1692
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001693- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1694 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1695 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1696
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001697
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001698What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1699=================================
1700
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001701*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001702
1703Core and builtins
1704-----------------
1705
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001706- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1707 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1708 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1709 objects now (one object instead of three).
1710
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001711- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1712 Windows DLLs.
1713
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001714- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1715 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001716
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001717- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1718 a new .pyc magic.
1719
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001720- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1721 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1722 be there.
1723
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001724- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1725 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1726 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1727
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001728- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1729 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1730 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1731
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001732- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1733
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001734- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1735 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1736 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001737
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001738- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1739 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1740
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001741- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1742
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001743- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001744 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001745
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001746- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1747
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001748- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1749
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001750- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1751 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1752
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001753- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1754 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1755 Fixes bug #858016 .
1756
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001757- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1758 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1759 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1760
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001761- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1762 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1763 improves their performance (about 35%).
1764
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001765- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1766 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1767 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1768
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001769- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1770 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1771 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1772 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1773
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001774- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1775 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001776 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001777 length is not known).
1778
1779- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1780 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001781 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1782 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001783 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1784
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001785- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1786 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1787
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001788- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1789 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1790 keyword arguments.
1791
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001792- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1793 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1794 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1795
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001796- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1797 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1798 cases.
1799
1800- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1801 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1802 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1803 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1804 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1805 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1806 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1807 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1808 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1809 a release build.
1810
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001811- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1812 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1813
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001814- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001815 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001816
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001817- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1818 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1819 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1820 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1821 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1822 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1823 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1824 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1825 destroyed.
1826
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001827- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1828 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1829 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1830 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1831 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1832 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1833 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1834 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1835
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001836- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1837 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1838 character other than a space.
1839
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001840- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1841 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1842 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1843 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1844 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1845 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1846 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1847 attributes with the same name.
1848
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001849- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1850 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1851 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1852 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1853 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1854 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1855 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1856 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1857 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1858 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1859 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1860 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1861 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1862 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001863
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001864- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1865 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1866 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1867 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1868 This has been repaired.
1869
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001870- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1871
1872- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1873
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001874- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1875 over a sequence.
1876
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001877- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001878 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001879
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001880- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1881
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001882- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1883 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1884 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1885 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1886 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1887 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1888 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1889 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1890
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001891- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1892 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1893 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1894
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001895- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1896 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1897 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1898 freelist.
1899
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001900- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1901 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1902
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001903- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1904 number.
1905
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001906- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1907 a TypeError exception.
1908
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001909- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1910 820195.
1911
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001912- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1913 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1914 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1915
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001916- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001917 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1918 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001919
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001920- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1921 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1922 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1923
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001924- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1925 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001926 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001927
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001928- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001929 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1930 the first call.
1931
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001932
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001933Extension modules
1934-----------------
1935
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001936- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1937 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1938
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001939- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1940 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1941 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1942 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1943 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1944 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1945 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001946
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001947- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1948
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001949- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1950
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001951- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1952 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1953
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001954- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1955 fewer false positives.
1956
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001957- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1958 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1959
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001960- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001961 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1962
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001963- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001964 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001965 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001966 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1967 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001968
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001969- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1970 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1971 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1972 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1973
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001974- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1975 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1976 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1977 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1978 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1979 #897625.
1980
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001981- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1982 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1983
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001984- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1985 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1986 and pops on either side of the deque.
1987
1988- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1989 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1990
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001991- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1992 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1993 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1994 other functions that expect a function argument.
1995
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001996- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1997
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001998- os.getsid was added.
1999
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00002000- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
2001 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
2002 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
2003
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00002004- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
2005
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00002006- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
2007
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00002008- readline.clear_history was added.
2009
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00002010- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
2011
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00002012- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
2013
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00002014- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
2015
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00002016- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
2017
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00002018- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
2019
2020- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
2021
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00002022- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
2023
2024- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
2025
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002026- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
2027 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
2028 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
2029
2030- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
2031 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
2032 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
2033 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
2034 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
2035 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
2036 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
2037
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00002038- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
2039 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
2040 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
2041 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002042
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002043- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002044 iterators from a single iterable.
2045
2046- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2047 of raising a TypeError exception.
2048
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002049- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2050 as parameter.
2051
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002052Library
2053-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002054
Armin Rigoa871ef22006-02-08 12:53:56 +00002055- Added a new module: cProfile, a C profiler with the same interface as the
2056 profile module. cProfile avoids some of the drawbacks of the hotshot
2057 profiler and provides a bit more information than the other two profilers.
2058 Based on "lsprof" (patch #1212837).
2059
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002060- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2061
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002062- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2063 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2064 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002065
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002066- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2067 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2068 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002069
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002070- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002071
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002072- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2073 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002074
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002075- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2076 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2077
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002078- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2079
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002080- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002081 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002082
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002083- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002084 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002085
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002086- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2087
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002088- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2089 on cygwin and mingw32.
2090
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002091- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2092
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002093- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2094 module.
2095
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002096- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2097 installation scheme for all platforms.
2098
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002099- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002100 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002101
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002102- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2103 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2104 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2105
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002106- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2107 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2108 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2109
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002110- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2111
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002112- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2113
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002114- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2115 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2116
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002117- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2118 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2119 type pattern with the same value exists.
2120
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002121- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2122 when run from the command prompt).
2123
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002124- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2125 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2126
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002127- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2128 default sort).
2129
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002130- Added global runctx function to profile module
2131
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002132- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2133
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002134- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2135
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002136- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2137
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002138- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002139 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2140 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2141 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2142 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2143 accordingly.
2144
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002145- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2146 decoding standards.
2147
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002148- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2149 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2150 called for all requests.
2151
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002152- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2153 they are passed to the compiler.
2154
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002155- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2156 indent, width and depth.
2157
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002158- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2159 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2160
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002161- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2162 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2163
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002164- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2165
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002166- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2167
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002168- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2169
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002170- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2171 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2172
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002173- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002174 for better performance.
2175
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002176- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002177
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002178- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2179 a string).
2180
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002181- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2182
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002183- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2184
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002185- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2186
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002187- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2188
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002189- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2190 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2191 list of fieldnames.
2192
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002193- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2194 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2195
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002196- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2197
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002198- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2199 empty lists.
2200
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002201- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2202 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2203 and shelves.
2204
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002205- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2206 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2207
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002208- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002209 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2210 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002211
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002212- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2213 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002214 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002215
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002216- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002217 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2218 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2219
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002220- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2221 and removed in Py2.4.
2222
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002223- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2224
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002225- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2226
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002227Tools/Demos
2228-----------
2229
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002230- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2231 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2232
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002233- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2234
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002235- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2236 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2237 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2238 destination in situations where both files are given.
2239
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002240- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2241 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2242 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2243 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2244
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002245- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2246
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002247- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2248 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2249 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2250 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2251 now.
2252
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002253- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2254 in effect
2255
2256- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2257 C-c C-h
2258
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002259- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2260 -d option was given.
2261
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002262Build
2263-----
2264
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002265- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2266 build under OS X.
2267
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002268- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2269 --enable-profiling.
2270
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002271- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2272 is configured --with-tsc.
2273
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002274- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2275 on AMD64.
2276
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002277- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2278 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2279
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002280- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2281 removed.
2282
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002283- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2284 supported (see PEP 11).
2285
2286- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2287
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002288- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2289
2290- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2291 (see PEP 11).
2292
2293- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2294 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2295
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002296C API
2297-----
2298
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002299- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2300 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2301 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2302
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002303- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2304 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2305 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2306 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2307
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002308- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2309 generator objects.
2310
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002311- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2312 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002313 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2314 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002315
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002316- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2317 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2318
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002319- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2320 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2321 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2322 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2323 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2324
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002325- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2326 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2327 about 10% faster.
2328
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002329- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2330 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2331
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002332- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2333 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2334 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2335 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2336
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002337Windows
2338-------
2339
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002340- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2341 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2342 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2343 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2344
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002345- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2346 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2347 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2348
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002349
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002350What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2351===============================
2352
2353*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2354
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002355IDLE
2356----
2357
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002358- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2359 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2360 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2361 context-menu actions.
2362
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002363- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2364 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2365 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2366 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2367 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2368 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2369 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2370 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2371 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2372
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002373
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002374What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2375=============================================
2376
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002377*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002378
2379Core and builtins
2380-----------------
2381
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002382- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002383 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002384 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2385
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002386Extension modules
2387-----------------
2388
2389- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2390 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2391 than once. This has been fixed.
2392
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002393- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2394 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2395 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2396 call.
2397
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002398- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2399
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002400Library
2401-------
2402
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002403- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2404 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2405
2406- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2407 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2408 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2409 restored.
2410
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002411IDLE
2412----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002413
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002414- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002415
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002416Build
2417-----
2418
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002419- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2420 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2421
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002422C API
2423-----
2424
2425Windows
2426-------
2427
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002428- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2429 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2430
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002431- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2432
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002433Mac
2434---
2435
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002436- Various fixes to pimp.
2437
2438- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2439
2440- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2441 more problems than it solves.
2442
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002443
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002444What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2445=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002446
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002447*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2448
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002449Core and builtins
2450-----------------
2451
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002452- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2453 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2454
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002455- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2456 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002457 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002458
2459- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2460 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2461 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002462 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002463
2464- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2465 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002466
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002467- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2468 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2469 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2470
2471- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002472 770247.
2473
2474- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002475
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002476Extension modules
2477-----------------
2478
2479- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2480 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2481
2482- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2483
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002484- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2485
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002486- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2487 contained within the _strptime module.
2488
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002489- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2490 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2491
2492- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002493 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2494
2495- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2496 the find_class attribute, if present.
2497
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002498- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002499
2500 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2501 (SF bug 763298).
2502
2503 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002504 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2505 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2506 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002507
2508 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2509
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002510Library
2511-------
2512
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002513- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2514
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002515- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2516 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2517 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2518 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2519 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2520 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2521 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2522 or Tester().
2523
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002524- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2525 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2526 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2527 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2528 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2529 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2530 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2531 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2532 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002533
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002534 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002535
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002536- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2537 weren't before was an oversight.
2538
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002539- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2540 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2541
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002542- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2543 when there are no lines.
2544
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002545- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2546 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2547
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002548- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2549 to child processes.
2550
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002551- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2552
2553- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2554
2555- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2556 xmlrpclib.
2557
2558- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2559 responses.
2560
2561- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2562 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2563
2564- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2565 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2566 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2567
2568- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2569 used as patterns.
2570
2571- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2572 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2573 than Tk 8.3.
2574
2575- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2576
2577- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002578
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002579Tools/Demos
2580-----------
2581
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002582- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2583
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002584- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2585
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002586- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002587
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002588Build
2589-----
2590
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002591- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2592
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002593- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2594
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002595- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2596 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002597
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002598- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2599 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2600 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002601
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002602C API
2603-----
2604
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002605- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2606 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2607
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002608Windows
2609-------
2610
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002611- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2612 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2613 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2614 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2615 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2616 Python exception ::
2617
2618 thread.error: can't start new thread
2619
2620 is raised now.
2621
2622- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2623 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2624 instead of from DLL teardown.
2625
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002626Mac
2627---
2628
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002629- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002630 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002631 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2632 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2633 the executable in the bundle.
2634
2635- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002636
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002637- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2638
2639- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2640 on Panther.
2641
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002642What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2643================================
2644
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002645*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002646
2647Core and builtins
2648-----------------
2649
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002650- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2651 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2652 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2653 with the -i option.
2654
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002655- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2656 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2657
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002658- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2659 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2660
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002661- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2662 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2663 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2664 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2665 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2666 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2667 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2668 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2669 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2670 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2671 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2672 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2673 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002674
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002675- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2676 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2677 embedded in a lambda expression.
2678
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002679- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2680 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2681 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2682 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2683 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2684
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002685- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2686 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2687 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2688
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002689- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2690 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2691
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002692- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2693 It's writable again.
2694
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002695- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2696 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2697 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002698 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002699
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002700- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2701 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2702 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2703
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002704Extension modules
2705-----------------
2706
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002707- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2708 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2709
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002710- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2711 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2712 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2713 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2714
2715- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2716 collection.
2717
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002718- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2719 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2720 unique within a single program run.
2721
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002722- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2723 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2724
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002725- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2726 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2727
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002728- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2729 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002730
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002731- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2732
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002733- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2734 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2735
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002736- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2737 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2738 for many BSD-derived systems.
2739
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002740
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002741Library
2742-------
2743
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002744- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2745 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2746 primary ones:
2747
2748 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2749 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2750 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2751
2752 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2753 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2754 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2755 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2756 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2757 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2758
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002759- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2760 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2761 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2762 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2763 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2764 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2765 argument.
2766
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002767- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2768 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2769 in the archive.
2770
2771- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2772 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2773
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002774- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2775 569574).
2776
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002777- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2778 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2779 no more.
2780
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002781- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2782 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2783 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2784 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2785 code coverage.
2786
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002787- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2788 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2789 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002790 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2791 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002792
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002793- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2794 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2795 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002796 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002797
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002798- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2799
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002800- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2801 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2802 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2803 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2804
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002805- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2806 handling.
2807
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002808- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2809 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2810
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002811- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2812 in socket.py.
2813
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002814- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2815
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002816- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2817 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2818 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2819 opener with proxy support.
2820
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002821- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2822
2823- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2824
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002825Tools/Demos
2826-----------
2827
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002828- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2829
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002830- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2831
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002832- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2833 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002834
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002835- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2836 files.
2837
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002838Build
2839-----
2840
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002841- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002842 different root directory.
2843
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002844C API
2845-----
2846
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002847- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2848 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2849 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2850 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2851 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2852 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2853 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2854 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2855 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2856 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2857
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002858- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2859 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2860 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2861 from Python.
2862
2863
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002864New platforms
2865-------------
2866
2867None this time.
2868
2869Tests
2870-----
2871
2872- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2873 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2874
2875Windows
2876-------
2877
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002878- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2879
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002880- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2881 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2882 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2883 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2884 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2885 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2886 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2887 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2888 that's what it's for.
2889
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002890Mac
2891---
2892
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002893- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2894 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2895 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2896 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002897- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2898 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2899- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002900
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002901SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2902------------------------------------
2903
2904430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2905598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2906622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2907661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2908683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2909697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2910713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2911724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2912727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2913729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2914730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2915731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2916732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2917733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2918735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2919740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2920744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2921745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2922747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2923749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2924751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2925753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2926755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2927757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2928760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2929
2930
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002931What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2932================================
2933
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002934*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002935
2936Core and builtins
2937-----------------
2938
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002939- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2940 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2941
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002942- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2943 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2944 and cannot be strings).
2945
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002946- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2947 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2948 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2949 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2950
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002951- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2952 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2953 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2954 Python itself.
2955
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002956- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2957 the referenced object, if it has one.
2958
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002959- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2960 the thread started at
2961 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2962
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002963- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2964 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2965 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2966 placed on a list index.
2967
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002968- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2969 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2970 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2971 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2972
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002973- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2974 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2975 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2976 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2977 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2978 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2979 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2980
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002981- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2982 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2983 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2984 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2985 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2986
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002987- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2988 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002989
2990- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2991 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2992 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2993 #693195.)
2994
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002995- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2996 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002997
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002998- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002999 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003000 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
3001 interpreter executions, would fail.
3002
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003003- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00003004 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00003005 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003006
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003007Extension modules
3008-----------------
3009
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00003010- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
3011 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
3012 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
3013 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
3014
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00003015- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
3016 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
3017
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00003018- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
3019 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
3020 and Greg Chapman.)
3021
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003022- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
3023 recursively.
3024
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00003025- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00003026 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
3027 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
3028 leaks.
3029
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00003030- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
3031
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00003032- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
3033 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
3034 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
3035 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
3036 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
3037 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
3038 #705836.
3039
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00003040- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00003041 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
3042
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00003043- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
3044 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
3045 See SF bug #692416.
3046
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00003047- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3048 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3049
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003050- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3051 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3052 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003053
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003054- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003055 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3056 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3057
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003058- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3059 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3060 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3061 timeouts to work properly.
3062
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003063Library
3064-------
3065
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003066- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3067 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3068 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3069 future release.
3070
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003071- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3072 for querying platform dependent features.
3073
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003074- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003075
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003076- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3077 pickle protocol versions.
3078
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003079- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3080 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3081 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3082
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003083- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3084
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003085- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3086 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3087 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3088 modules.
3089
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003090- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3091 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3092 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3093
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003094- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3095 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3096
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003097- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3098 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3099 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3100
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003101- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003102 MS Office extensions.
3103
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003104- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3105 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3106
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003107- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3108 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3109
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003110- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3111 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3112 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3113 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3114 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3115 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3116
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003117- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3118 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3119 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003120
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003121- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3122 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3123 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3124
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003125- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3126
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003127- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3128 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3129 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3130
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003131Tools/Demos
3132-----------
3133
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003134- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3135 See the module docstring for details.
3136
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003137Build
3138-----
3139
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003140- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3141 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003142
3143C API
3144-----
3145
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003146- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3147
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003148- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3149 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3150 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3151
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003152- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3153 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003154
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003155 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3156 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3157 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003158
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003159- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003160 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3161
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003162- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3163 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3164 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003165
3166New platforms
3167-------------
3168
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003169None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003170
3171Tests
3172-----
3173
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003174- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3175 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003176
3177Windows
3178-------
3179
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003180- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3181 function.
3182
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003183- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3184 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003185
3186Mac
3187---
3188
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003189- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3190 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003191
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003192- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3193 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003194
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003195- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3196 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3197 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003198
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003199- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003200 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3201 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003202
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003203- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3204 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003205
3206
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003207What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3208=================================
3209
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003210*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003211
3212Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003213-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003214
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003215- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3216 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3217 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3218
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003219- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3220 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3221 (SF patch #664376.)
3222
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003223- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3224 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3225 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3226 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3227 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3228 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003229 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003230
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003231- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3232 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3233 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3234 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003235 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003236
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003237- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3238 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3239 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3240 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3241 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3242 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3243 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3244 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3245 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3246 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3247 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3248
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003249- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3250 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3251 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3252 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3253 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3254 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3255
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003256- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3257 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3258
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003259- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3260 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3261 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3262 case.)
3263
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003264- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3265 passed as unicode strings.
3266
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003267- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3268 See SF bug #683467.
3269
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003270- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3271 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3272
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003273- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3274
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003275- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3276
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003277- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3278 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3279 arguments.
3280
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003281- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3282 See SF bug #667147.
3283
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003284- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003285 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003286 See SF bug #676155.
3287
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003288- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003289 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003290 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3291 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3292 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3293 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3294 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3295 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003296
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003297Extension modules
3298-----------------
3299
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003300- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3301 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3302 tp_as_number pointer.
3303
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003304- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3305 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3306 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3307 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3308 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3309
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003310- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3311
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003312- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3313
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003314- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003315 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003316 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3317 patch #678531.)
3318
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003319- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3320 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3321
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003322- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3323 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3324
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003325- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3326
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003327- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3328 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3329 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3330
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003331- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3332
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003333- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3334 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3335
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003336- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003337
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003338- datetime changes:
3339
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003340 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3341
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003342 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3343 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3344 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3345 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3346 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3347 now.
3348
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003349 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003350 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3351 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003352
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003353 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003354 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003355 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3356 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3357 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3358 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003359
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003360 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3361 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3362 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003363 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3364
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003365 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3366 by a later example coded by Guido.
3367
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003368 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003369 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3370 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3371 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003372 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3373 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3374
3375 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3376 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3377 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3378 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3379 tzinfo subclass instance.
3380
3381 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3382 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3383 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3384 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3385 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3386 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3387 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3388 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003389
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003390 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3391 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3392 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3393 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3394 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003395 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3396
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003397 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003398
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003399 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3400 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3401 as a naive datetime object.
3402
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003403 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3404 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3405 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3406
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003407 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3408 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3409 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3410 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3411 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3412 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3413 comparison.
3414
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003415 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3416 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3417 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3418 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003419 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003420
3421 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003422
3423 and ::
3424
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003425 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3426
3427 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3428 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3429 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3430 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3431
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003432 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3433 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3434 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3435 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3436 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3437
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003438 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3439 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003440 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3441 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003442
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003443Library
3444-------
3445
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003446- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3447 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3448
3449- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3450 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3451 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3452 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3453 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3454 See PEP 307 for details.
3455
3456- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3457 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3458
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003459- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3460 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003461 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003462 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3463 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003464 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003465
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003466- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3467 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3468
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003469- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3470 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3471 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3472
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003473- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3474
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003475- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3476 exception.
3477
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003478- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3479 class.
3480
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003481- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3482 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3483 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3484
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003485- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3486 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3487
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003488- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003489 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3490 See SF bug #659228.
3491
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003492- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3493 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3494 See SF patch #651082.
3495
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003496- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003497
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003498- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3499 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3500
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003501- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003502 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003503
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003504- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3505 DOS paths from other platforms.
3506
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003507Tools/Demos
3508-----------
3509
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003510- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3511 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3512 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3513 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3514 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3515 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3516 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3517 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3518 example:
3519
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003520 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3521 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003522
3523 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3524
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003525
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003526Build
3527-----
3528
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003529- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3530 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3531 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003532 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3533
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003534 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3535
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003536- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3537 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3538 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3539 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3540 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3541 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3542 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3543 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3544 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3545
3546- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3547 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3548 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3549 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3550
3551- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3552 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3553
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003554C API
3555-----
3556
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003557- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3558 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003559
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003560- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3561 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3562 tp_as_number pointer.
3563
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003564- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3565 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3566 (SF #681367)
3567
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003568- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3569 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3570 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3571 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003572
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003573Tests
3574-----
3575
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003576- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003577 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3578 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3579 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3580 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3581 pydoc.)
3582
3583- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3584
3585- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003586
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003587Windows
3588-------
3589
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003590- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3591 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3592 time).
3593
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003594- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3595 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3596
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003597- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3598 release without strong cryptography.
3599
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003600- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003601 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003602
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003603- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3604 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3605
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003606Mac
3607---
3608
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003609- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3610 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003611
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003612- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3613 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3614 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003615
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003616- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3617 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003618
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003619- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3620 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3621 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3622 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003623
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003624- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003625 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3626 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3627 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003628
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003629
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003630What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003631=================================
3632
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003633*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003634
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003635Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003636--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003637
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003638- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3639
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003640- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3641 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003642 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003643 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003644 a different meaning than before.
3645
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003646- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003647 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003648 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003649
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003650- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003651 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003652 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003653
3654- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3655 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3656 and deallocation.
3657
3658- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3659 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3660
3661- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3662 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3663 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3664 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3665 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3666
3667- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3668 now detected by the garbage collector.
3669
3670- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3671 [SF bug 519621]
3672
3673- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3674 identifier.
3675
3676- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3677 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3678 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3679 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3680 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3681 [SF bug 563060]
3682
3683- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3684 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3685 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3686 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3687 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3688
3689- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3690 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3691 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3692
3693- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3694
3695- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3696 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3697 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3698 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3699 state of the slots would be lost.)
3700
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003701Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003702-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003703
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003704- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003705 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3706 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3707 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3708 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003709 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3710 Jython 2.1.
3711
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003712- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003713 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003714 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3715 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3716 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3717 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3718 these, see PEP 302.
3719
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003720- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3721 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3722 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3723
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003724- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3725 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3726 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3727
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003728- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3729 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3730 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3731
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003732- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3733 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3734 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3735 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3736 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3737 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3738 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3739 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3740 releases or implementations.
3741
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003742- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003743 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3744 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003745
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003746- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3747 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3748
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003749- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3750 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3751 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3752
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003753- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3754 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3755
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003756- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3757 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003758 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3759 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003760
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003761- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3762 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3763 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3764 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3765 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3766
3767 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3768 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3769 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3770 pattern.
3771
3772 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3773 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3774 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3775 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3776
3777 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3778 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3779 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3780 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3781 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3782 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3783
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003784- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3785 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3786 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3787 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3788 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3789 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3790 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3791 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003792
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003793- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3794 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3795 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3796 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3797 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003798 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3799 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3800 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3801 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3802 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3803 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3804 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003805
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003806- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3807 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3808
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003809- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3810 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3811 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3812 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3813 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3814 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3815 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3816 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3817 to Zack Weinberg!
3818
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003819- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3820 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3821 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3822 type. This has been fixed now.
3823
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003824- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3825 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3826 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3827
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003828- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3829 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3830 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3831 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3832 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3833 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3834 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3835 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003836 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003837
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003838- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3839 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3840 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003841
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003842- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3843 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3844 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3845 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3846 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3847 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3848 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3849 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003850 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003851 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3852 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3853
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003854- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3855 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3856 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3857 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3858 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3859 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3860 this.)
3861
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003862- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3863 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003864 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003865 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003866 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3867 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003868 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3869 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003870
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003871- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3872 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3873 currently running.
3874
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003875- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3876 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3877 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3878 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3879
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003880- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3881 as directory names.
3882
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003883- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3884 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3885
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003886- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3887 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3888
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003889- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003890 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3891 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003892
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003893- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3894 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3895 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3896 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3897 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3898
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003899- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3900 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3901 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3902 removed.
3903
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003904- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3905 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3906 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3907
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003908- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3909 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3910 to __debug__.
3911
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003912- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3913 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3914 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3915
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003916- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3917 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3918 deprecated now.
3919
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003920- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3921 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3922 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003923
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003924- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3925 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3926 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3927 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3928 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003929
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003930- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3931 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3932
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003933- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3934 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3935 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003936 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003937 is backward compatible.
3938
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003939- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3940 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3941 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3942 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3943 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3944
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003945- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3946 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3947 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3948 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3949 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3950 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003951
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003952- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3953 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3954
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003955- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3956 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3957
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003958- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3959 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3960 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3961 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3962 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3963
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003964- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3965 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3966 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3967
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003968- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003969 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3970
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003971- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3972 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3973 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003974
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003975- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3976 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3977
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003978- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3979 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3980 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3981
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003982- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3983
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003984Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003985-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003986
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003987- Added three operators to the operator module:
3988 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3989 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3990 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3991
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003992- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3993
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003994- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3995 archives.
3996
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003997- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3998 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3999 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
4000
4001 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
4002
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004003- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
4004 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
4005 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00004006 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004007
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00004008- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
4009 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
4010 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
4011 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00004012 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
4013 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
4014 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
4015 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00004016
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00004017- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
4018 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00004019
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00004020- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
4021
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00004022- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
4023 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
4024
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00004025- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
4026 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
4027 supported.
4028
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00004029- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
4030
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00004031- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
4032 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00004033
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00004034- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
4035 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
4036
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00004037- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
4038
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004039- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
4040 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
4041
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00004042- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
4043 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
4044 functions but callable type objects.
4045
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004046- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004047 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004048 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004049
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004050- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4051 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004052
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004053- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4054 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004055
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004056- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4057 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4058 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4059 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4060
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004061- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4062 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004063
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004064- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4065 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4066 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4067 and __imul__.
4068
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004069- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004070 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4071 is called.
4072
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004073- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4074 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4075 interpreter was compiled.
4076
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004077- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4078 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4079 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004080 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004081 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4082 1, not 2.
4083
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004084- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4085 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4086 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4087 limit.
4088
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004089- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4090 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4091 bug #623464.
4092
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004093- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4094 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4095 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4096 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4097
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004098Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004099-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004100
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004101- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4102
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004103- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4104 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4105 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4106 with Python 2.3a2.
4107
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004108- os.path exposes getctime.
4109
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004110- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004111 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004112 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004113 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004114 unit tests of floating point results.
4115
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004116- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4117 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4118 has been increased.
4119
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004120- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4121 executed.
4122
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004123- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4124 postinstallation script.
4125
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004126- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4127 test the current module.
4128
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004129- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004130 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4131 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4132 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4133 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4134
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004135- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004136 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004137 Ward's Optik package.
4138
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004139- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4140 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4141 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4142 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4143
4144- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4145 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004146 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004147
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004148- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4149 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4150 shelf are binary pickles.
4151
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004152- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4153 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4154
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004155- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4156 modules are iterators now.
4157
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004158- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4159 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4160 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4161 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4162 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4163 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004164
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004165- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4166 with their entity value.
4167
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004168- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4169
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004170- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4171 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004172
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004173- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4174 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004175 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004176
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004177- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4178 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4179 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4180 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4181 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4182 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4183 main():
4184
4185 import locale
4186 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4187
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004188- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4189 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4190
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004191- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4192 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4193 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4194 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4195 to the new standard.
4196
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004197- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4198 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4199 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4200 an extension to the database.
4201
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004202- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4203 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4204 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4205 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004206 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004207
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004208- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004209 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004210
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004211- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4212 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4213 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4214 bounded integers.
4215
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004216- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4217 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4218 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4219 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4220 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4221 in existence.
4222
4223 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4224 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4225 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4226 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4227 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4228 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4229
4230 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4231 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4232 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4233 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4234
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004235- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4236 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4237 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4238
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004239- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4240
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004241- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4242 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4243 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4244 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4245
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004246- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4247 argument.
4248
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004249- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4250 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4251 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4252 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4253 [SF patch 560794].
4254
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004255- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4256 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4257 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004258 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4259 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4260 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004261
4262- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4263 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004264
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004265- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4266 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4267 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4268 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004269
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004270- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4271 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4272 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4273 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4274 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4275
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004276- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004277
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004278- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4279
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004280- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4281 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4282 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4283 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4284 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4285 identical to None.
4286
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004287- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4288 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4289 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4290 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4291 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4292 results now.
4293
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004294- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4295 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4296
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004297- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4298 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4299 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4300 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4301 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4302 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4303 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4304 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4305
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004306- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4307
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004308- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4309 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4310
4311- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4312 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4313 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4314 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4315 and other systems.
4316
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004317- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4318 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4319 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4320 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 +00004321 work well with these.
4322
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004323- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4324
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004325- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004326 connections.
4327
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004328- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4329 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4330 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4331
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004332- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4333 sets
4334
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004335- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4336 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4337 name.
4338
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004339- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4340 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4341 passed in.
4342
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004343- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004344 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004345 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4346 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004347
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004348- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4349
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004350- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4351
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004352- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4353 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4354 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4355
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004356- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4357 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4358 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4359 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004360 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004361
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004362- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004363 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004364 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004365
4366- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4367 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4368 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4369
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004370- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004371 the value of its expression argument.
4372
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004373- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4374 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4375 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4376
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004377- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4378 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4379 skipstone browser was included.
4380
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004381- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4382 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4383
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004384Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004385-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004386
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004387- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4388 names in addition to accepting file names.
4389
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004390- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4391 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4392 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4393 still used and useful.)
4394
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004395- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4396 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4397 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4398 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004399
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004400- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4401 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4402 the generated binary.
4403
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004404Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004405-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004406
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004407- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4408
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004409- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4410 except in the hands of experts.
4411
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004412- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004413 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4414 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4415 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004416
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004417- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4418 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4419 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4420 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4421 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4422 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4423 builds.
4424
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004425- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4426 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4427 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4428 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4429 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4430 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4431 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4432 new type.
4433
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004434- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004435
4436 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4437 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4438 positive infinities.
4439
4440 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4441 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4442 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4443 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4444 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4445 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4446 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4447
4448 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4449
4450 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4451
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004452- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4453 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4454 size of the executable.
4455
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004456- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4457 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4458 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4459 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004460
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004461- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4462
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004463- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4464 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4465 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004466
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004467- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4468 well as Unix.
4469
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004470- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4471 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4472 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4473 modules in the README file for details.
4474
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004475C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004476-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004477
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004478- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4479 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004480 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004481 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004482 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004483
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004484- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4485 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4486 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4487 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4488 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4489 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004490 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004491 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4492 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4493 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4494 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4495 aligned.)
4496
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004497- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4498 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4499 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4500
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004501- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4502 level.
4503
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004504- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4505 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4506 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4507 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4508 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4509
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004510- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4511 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4512 code.
4513
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004514- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4515 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4516 adjusting for negative indices.
4517
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004518- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4519 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4520 object.
4521
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004522- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4523 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4524 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4525
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004526- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4527 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004528
4529- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4530
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004531- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4532 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4533 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4534 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4535
4536- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4537
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004538- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004539
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004540- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004541 without going through the buffer API.
4542
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004543- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004544
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004545- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4546 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4547 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4548 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4549
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004550- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4551 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4552
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004553- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004554 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4555
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004556New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004557-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004558
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004559- OpenVMS is now supported.
4560
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004561- AtheOS is now supported.
4562
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004563- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4564
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004565- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4566
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004567Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004568-----
4569
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004570- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4571 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4572 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004573
4574Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004575-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004576
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004577- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4578 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4579 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4580 bugs.
4581 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004582 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004583 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4584 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004585 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004586
4587- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004588 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004589
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004590- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4591 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4592
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004593- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4594 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004595 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004596 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4597
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004598- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4599 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4600 use files" uninstall option).
4601
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004602- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4603
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004604- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4605 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4606
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004607- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4608 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4609 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4610
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004611- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4612 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4613 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4614 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4615 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004616 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4617 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4618 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004619
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004620- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004621 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004622 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4623 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4624 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4625 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4626 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4627 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4628 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4629 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4630 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4631 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4632 work around.
4633
4634- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4635 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4636 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4637 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4638 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4639 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4640 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4641 specified with O_CREAT too).
4642
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004643Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004644----
4645
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004646- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004647
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004648- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4649 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4650 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4651
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004652- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4653 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4654 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4655
4656- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4657 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4658 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4659 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4660 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4661 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4662 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4663 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004664
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004665- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4666 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4667 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004668
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004669- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4670 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4671 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4672 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4673 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004674
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004675- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4676 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4677 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004678
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004679- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4680 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004681
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004682- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4683 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4684 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4685 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4686 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004687
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004688- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4689 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4690 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4691
4692- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4693 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4694 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004695
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004696- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4697 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4698 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4699 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004700 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004701
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004702- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4703 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004704
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004705- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4706 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004707
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004708- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004709 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004710 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4711 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004712
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004713
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004714What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004715===============================
4716
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004717*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4718
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004719Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004720--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004721
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004722- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4723 with a custom metaclass.
4724
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004725Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004726-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004727
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004728- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4729 are proxies.
4730
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004731Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004732-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004733
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004734- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4735 very short strings.
4736
4737- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4738 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4739 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4740 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4741 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4742
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004743Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004744-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004745
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004746- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4747 close or delete time).
4748
4749- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4750 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4751
4752- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4753
4754- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004755 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004756
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004757Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004758-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004759
4760Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004761-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004762
4763C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004764-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004765
4766New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004767-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004768
4769Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004770-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004771
4772Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004773-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004774
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004775- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4776
4777- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4778 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4779
4780- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4781 deleted at process exit time.
4782
4783- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4784 in backslash.
4785
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004786Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004787----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004788
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004789- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4790 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4791 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4792
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004793
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004794What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004795===========================
4796
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004797*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4798
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004799Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004800--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004801
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004802- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4803 been extensively updated. See
4804
4805 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4806
4807 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4808
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004809- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4810 deleted!
4811
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004812- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4813 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4814 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4815 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4816 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4817
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004818- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4819
4820 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4821 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4822
4823 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4824 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4825 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4826 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4827 supported anyway.
4828
4829 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4830 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4831
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004832- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4833 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4834 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4835 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4836 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004837
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004838- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4839 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4840 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4841
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004842Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004843-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004844
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004845- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4846 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4847 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4848 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4849 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4850 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004851 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4852 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4853 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4854 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004855
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004856- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4857 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4858 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4859
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004860Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004861-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004862
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004863- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4864
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004865Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004866-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004867
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004868- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4869 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4870 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4871 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4872 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4873 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4874
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004875- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4876
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004877- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4878
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004879- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4880
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004881- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4882 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4883 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4884
4885- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4886
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004887Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004888-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004889
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004890- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4891 off a search on Google.
4892
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004893Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004894-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004895
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004896- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4897 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4898 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4899 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4900 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4901 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4902 other platforms should do likewise.
4903
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004904- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4905 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4906 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4907
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004908C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004909-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004910
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004911- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4912 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4913 producing key-value pairs.
4914
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004915- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004916 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004917 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4918 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4919 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4920 previously went unchallenged.
4921
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004922New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004923-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004924
4925Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004926-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004927
4928Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004929-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004930
4931Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004932----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004933
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004934- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4935 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004936
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004937- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4938 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4939 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4940 home.
4941
4942
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004943What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004944===========================
4945
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004946*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4947
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004948Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004949--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004950
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004951- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4952 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004953
4954 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004955 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004956
4957 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4958 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004959 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004960 This needs to be documented.
4961
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004962- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4963 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4964
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004965- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4966 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4967 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4968
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004969- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4970 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4971
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004972- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4973 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4974 class forbids it).
4975
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004976- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4977 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4978 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4979
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004980- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4981
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004982Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004983-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004984
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004985- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4986 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004987 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004988
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004989- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4990 (like 1 + '').
4991
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004992Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004993-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004994
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004995- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4996 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4997 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4998 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004999 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005000 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
5001
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00005002- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
5003 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
5004 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
5005 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
5006
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005007- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
5008 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005009 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
5010 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
5011 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005012
5013- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
5014 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005015
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00005016- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
5017 bytes on its input.
5018
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005019Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005020-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005021
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005022- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00005023 convenience function.
5024
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005025- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
5026 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
5027 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005028 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
5029 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
5030 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
5031 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
5032 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
5033 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005034
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00005035- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
5036 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
5037 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
5038 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
5039
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00005040- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
5041 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
5042 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
5043
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005044- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
5045 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
5046 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
5047 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5048
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005049- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5050 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005051 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005052 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5053 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5054 new -l and -e options.
5055
5056- statcache is now deprecated.
5057
5058- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5059 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005060 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005061 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5062 time properly taken into account.
5063
5064- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5065 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5066 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5067 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5068
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005069Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005070-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005071
5072Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005073-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005074
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005075- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5076 is built with libdb3 if available.
5077
5078- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5079
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005080C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005081-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005082
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005083- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5084 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5085 PySequence_Size().
5086
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005087- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5088
5089- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5090 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5091 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5092
5093- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5094 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5095
5096- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5097 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5098
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005099New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005100-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005101
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005102- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5103 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5104
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005105- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5106 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5107
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005108- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5109
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005110Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005111-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005112
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005113- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5114 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5115
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005116Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005117-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005118
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005119Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005120----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005121
5122- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5123 removed completely in the next release.
5124
5125- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5126 OSX.
5127
5128- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5129 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5130
5131- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5132
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005133
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005134What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005135===========================
5136
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005137*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5138
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005139Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005140--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005141
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005142- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005143 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005144 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005145 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5146 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005147 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5148 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005149 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5150 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005151
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005152- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5153 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5154
5155- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5156 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5157
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005158Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005159-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005160
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005161- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5162 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5163 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5164 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5165 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5166 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5167 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5168 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5169
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005170- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5171 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5172 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5173 example).
5174
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005175- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005176 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005177 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005178 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005179
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005180- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5181 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5182 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005183 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005184
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005185- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5186 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5187 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5188 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5189 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5190 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5191
5192 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5193
5194 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5195
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005196Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005197-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005198
5199- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5200
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005201- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5202
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005203- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5204 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005205
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005206- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5207 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5208 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5209 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5210 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5211 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005212 attributes.
5213
5214- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5215 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5216 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005217
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005218- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5219 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5220 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005221
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005222- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5223 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5224 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005225 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5226 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5227
5228- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5229 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005230
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005231Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005232-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005233
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005234- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5235 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5236
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005237- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5238 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5239 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5240 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5241
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005242- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5243 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5244 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5245 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5246
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005247 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5248 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5249 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5250 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5251 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5252 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5253 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5254 without losing information).
5255
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005256- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005257 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5258 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5259 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5260 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5261 module).
5262
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005263 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005264 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5265 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5266 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5267 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005268
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005269- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005270 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5271 encoding.
5272
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005273- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5274 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5275
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005276- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005277 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5278
5279- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5280 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5281 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5282 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5283
5284- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5285
5286- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5287 ON, and OFF.
5288
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005289- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5290 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5291
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005292Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005293-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005294
5295- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5296 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5297 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005298
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005299- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5300 been added: -X and -E.
5301
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005302Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005303-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005304
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005305- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5306 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5307
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005308C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005309-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005310
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005311- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5312 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5313 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5314 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5315 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5316
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005317- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5318 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5319 as long) arguments.
5320
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005321- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5322 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5323 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5324 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5325 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5326 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5327
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005328- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5329 input.
5330
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005331New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005332-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005333
5334Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005335-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005336
5337Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005338-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005339
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005340- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5341 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5342 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5343
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005344- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5345 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5346 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005347 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005348
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005349 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5350 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5351 import signal
5352 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005353
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005354 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005355 while 1:
5356 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005357 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005358 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5359 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5360 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5361 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005362
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005363
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005364What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5365===========================
5366
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005367*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5368
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005369Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005370--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005371
5372- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5373 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5374 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5375
5376- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5377 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5378 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5379 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5380 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5381 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5382 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005383
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005384- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005385 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005386 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5387 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5388 associate a docstring with a property.
5389
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005390- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5391 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5392 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5393 other built-in object types.
5394
5395- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5396 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5397 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5398 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5399 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5400
5401- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5402 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5403
5404- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5405 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005406 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005407 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5408 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5409 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5410 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5411 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5412
5413- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5414 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5415 class.
5416
5417- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5418 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5419 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5420 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5421
5422- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5423 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5424 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5425 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5426
5427- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5428 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5429
5430- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5431 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5432 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5433 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5434 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005435 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005436 with the same value as s.
5437
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005438- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5439
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005440Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005441----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005442
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005443- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5444
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005445- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5446 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5447 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5448 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5449 objects.
5450
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005451- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5452 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005453 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5454 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5455
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005456- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5457 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5458 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5459
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005460Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005461-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005462
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005463- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5464 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5465 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5466 by the instances.
5467
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005468- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5469 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5470 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5471
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005472- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5473 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5474 before the entire comparison is complete.
5475
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005476- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5477 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5478 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5479
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005480- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5481 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5482 getwriter().
5483
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005484- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5485 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5486
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005487- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005488 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5489 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5490
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005491- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5492 iterable object.
5493
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005494- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5495 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005496
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005497- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5498 authentication.
5499
5500- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5501 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005502
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005503- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005504 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5505 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5506 a sample driver.)
5507
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005508Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005509-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005510
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005511- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5512 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5513 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5514 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5515 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5516 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5517 kernel has large file support.
5518
5519- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5520 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5521 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5522 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5523 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5524
5525- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5526 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5527 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5528
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005529C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005530-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005531
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005532- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5533 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5534
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005535New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005536-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005537
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005538- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5539 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5540
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005541Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005542-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005543
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005544- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5545 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5546 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5547 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5548 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5549
5550- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5551 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5552 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5553 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5554
5555- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5556 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5557
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005558Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005559-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005560
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005561- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005562 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5563 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005564
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005565
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005566What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5567===========================
5568
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005569*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5570
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005571Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005572----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005573
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005574- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5575 big to represent as a C double.
5576
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005577- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5578 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5579 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5580 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5581 restriction).
5582
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005583- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5584 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5585 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5586 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5587 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5588
5589 >>> dir([])
5590 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5591 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5592 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5593 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5594 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5595 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5596 'reverse', 'sort']
5597
5598 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5599
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005600- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005601 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5602 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5603 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5604 OverflowError exception.
5605
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005606- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005607 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005608 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5609 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5610 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5611 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5612 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005613 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005614 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5615 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5616
5617 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5618 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5619 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5620 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005621
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005622- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005623 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5624 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5625 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5626 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5627 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5628 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5629 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5630 once it is created.
5631
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005632- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5633 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5634 (key, value) pairs.
5635
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005636- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005637 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5638 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5639
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005640- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5641 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5642 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5643 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5644 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005645
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005646- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005647 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5648 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5649
5650 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5651
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005652- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005653 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5654
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005655Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005656-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005657
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005658- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005659 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5660 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005661
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005662- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5663 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5664 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5665 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5666 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5667 in this area anymore).
5668
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005669- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5670 threading.Timer.
5671
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005672- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5673 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5674
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005675- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005676 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5677
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005678- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005679 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5680 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5681 converted to Python longs.
5682
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005683- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005684 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5685
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005686- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5687 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5688 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5689
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005690Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005691-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005692
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005693- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5694 division operators as per PEP 238.
5695
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005696Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005697-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005698
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005699- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5700 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5701 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5702 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5703
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005704C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005705-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005706
5707- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005708
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005709- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5710 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005711 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005712
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005713 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5714 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005715 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005716 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005717
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005718- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005719 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5720 module:
5721
5722 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005723
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005724 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5725 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005726
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005727 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5728 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005729
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005730 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5731
5732 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5733
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005734- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005735 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5736 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5737 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005738
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005739New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005740-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005741
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005742- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5743 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5744 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5745 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5746 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005747
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005748Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005749-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005750
5751Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005752-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005753
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005754- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5755 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5756 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5757 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005758 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5759 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5760 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5761 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5762 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005763
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005764- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005765 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5766
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005767
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005768What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5769===========================
5770
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005771*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5772
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005773Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005774-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005775
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005776- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5777 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5778
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005779- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5780 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5781 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005782
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005783- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5784 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5785 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5786 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005787
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005788- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5789
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005790- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005791
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005792Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005793-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005794
5795- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005796 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005797 the module docstring for details.
5798
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005799Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005800-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005801
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005802- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005803 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5804 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5805 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005806
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005807- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5808 Nick Mathewson.
5809
5810Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005811----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005812
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005813- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5814 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5815 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5816 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5817 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5818 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5819 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5820 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5821
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005822- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5823 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5824 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5825 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5826
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005827- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5828 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5829 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5830 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5831 come a long way).
5832
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005833- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5834 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5835 write filters for these warnings).
5836
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005837- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5838 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5839 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5840 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5841 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5842
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005843- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5844 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5845 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5846 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5847 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5848 older distribution.
5849
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005850Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005851-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005852
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005853- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5854 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005855 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005856
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005857- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5858 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5859 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5860
5861- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5862
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005863- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5864
5865- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5866
5867- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5868
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005869- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005870
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005871- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5872
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005873New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005874-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005875
5876C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005877-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005878
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005879- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5880 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5881 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5882 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5883 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5884 against buffer overruns.
5885
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005886- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005887 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5888 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005889 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5890 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5891 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5892
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005893- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5894 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5895 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5896 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5897 deprecated.
5898
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005899Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005900-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005901
5902- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5903 relevant is found.
5904
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005905
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005906What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005907===========================
5908
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005909*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5910
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005911Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005912----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005913
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005914- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5915 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5916 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5917 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5918 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5919 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5920 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5921 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005922 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005923 repaired.
5924
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005925- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005926 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005927 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5928 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5929 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5930 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5931 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5932 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5933 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5934 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5935
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005936- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5937 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5938 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5939 leading BMO character).
5940
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005941- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5942 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5943 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5944
5945 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5946 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5947 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005948
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005949 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5950 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5951 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5952 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5953 for various simple to use conversions.
5954
5955 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5956 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5957
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005958 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5959 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5960 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5961 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5962 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5963 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5964 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5965 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5966 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5967 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5968 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5969 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5970 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5971 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5972 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005973
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005974- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5975 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5976 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005977 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005978 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005979
5980 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005981 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5982 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5983 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5984 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5985 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005986 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5987 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005988
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005989 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5990 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5991 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005992 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005993
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005994- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5995 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5996 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5997 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5998 floating arithmetic,
5999
6000 x = 9007199254740992.0
6001 print long(x)
6002
6003 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
6004 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
6005 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
6006 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
6007 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
6008 functions are of good quality).
6009
6010 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
6011 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
6012 algorithms to break.
6013
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00006014- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
6015 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
6016 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
6017 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
6018 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
6019 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
6020 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
6021 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
6022 order.
6023
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006024- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
6025 operation along the most common code paths.
6026
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006027- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
6028 the same as dict.has_key(x).
6029
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00006030- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
6031 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
6032 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
6033 {}.update(UserDict())
6034
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006035- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
6036 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
6037 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
6038 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
6039 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
6040 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
6041 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
6042 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
6043
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006044- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00006045 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006046
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006047 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006048 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6049 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006050 join() method of strings
6051 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006052 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6053 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006054 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006055 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006056
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006057- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6058 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6059
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006060- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6061 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6062
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006063- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6064 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6065 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6066 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6067
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006068- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6069 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006070 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006071 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6072 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006073
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006074- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6075
6076
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006077Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006078-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006079
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006080- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006081 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006082 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6083 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6084
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006085- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6086 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6087
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006088- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6089 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6090 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6091 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6092
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006093- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6094 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6095 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6096
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006097- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6098
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006099- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6100
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006101- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6102 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6103 that are still imported into string.py).
6104
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006105- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6106
6107- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6108 Now it does.
6109
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006110- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6111
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006112- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6113 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6114 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6115 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6116 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006117 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6118 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006119
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006120- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6121 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6122 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6123 'help(object)'.
6124
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006125Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006126-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006127
6128- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006129 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006130 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6131 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6132
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006133- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006134 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6135 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006136
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006137C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006138-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006139
6140- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6141 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006142
6143----
6144
6145**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**