blob: 7753df57682e3f614e6fc70d21ea357b4c2f6aa8 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000013- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
14 list.sort().
15
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000016- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
17 (2+3) --> (5).
18
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000019- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
20
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000021
22Extension Modules
23-----------------
24
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000025- The spwd has been added, allowing access to the shadow password database.
26
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000027- stat_float_times is now True.
28
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000029- array.array objects are now picklable.
30
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000031- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
32 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
33
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000034- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
35 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
36 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
37
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000038- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
39 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000040
41Library
42-------
43
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +000044- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
45
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +000046- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
47
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000048- Enhancements to the csv module:
49
50 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
51 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
52 PEP 305.
53 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
54 reporting.
55 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
56 dictates.
57 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000058 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000059 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000060 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
61 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000062 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
63 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +000064 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000065 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
66 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
67 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
68 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
69 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
70 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
71 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
72 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
73 without first creating a dialect class.
74 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
75 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
76 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +000077 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000078 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
79 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +000080 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
81 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
82 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
83 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000084 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
85 This has been fixed.
86
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +000087- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
88 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
89 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
90 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
91
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +000092- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
93
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +000094- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
95 (Bug #951915).
96
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +000097- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
98 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
99 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
100 encoding alias table
101
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000102- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
103
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000104- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
105 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
106
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000107- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
108
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000109- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
110
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000111- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
112
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000113- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
114
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000115- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
116
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000117- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
118 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
119 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
120
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000121- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000122 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000123
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000124- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
125 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
126 tokenizer with very long source lines.
127
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000128- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
129 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
130
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000131- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
132 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000133
134Build
135-----
136
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000137- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
138 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
139 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
140 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
141 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
142 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
143 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
144 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
145
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000146
147C API
148-----
149
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000150- Removed PyRange_New().
151
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000152
153Tests
154-----
155
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000156- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000157
158Mac
159---
160
161
162
163Tools/Demos
164-----------
165
166
167
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000168What's New in Python 2.4 final?
169===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000170
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000171*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000172
173Core and builtins
174-----------------
175
176- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
177 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
178 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
179
180
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000181What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
182==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000183
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000184*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000185
186Core and builtins
187-----------------
188
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000189- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
190 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
191 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
192
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000193
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000194Library
195-------
196
197- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
198 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
199 raised is re-raised.
200
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000201- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
202 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
203
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000204- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
205 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
206 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
207 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
208 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
209 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
210 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
211 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
212 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
213 by the slice are recomputed now.
214
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000215- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000216
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000217Build
218-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000219
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000220- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
221 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
222 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000223
224C API
225-----
226
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000227- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
228
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000229
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000230What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
231================================
232
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000233*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000234
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000235License
236-------
237
238The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
239is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
240changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
241Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
242intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
243durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
244the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
245License::
246
247 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
248
249says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
250to Python 2.1.1.
251
252The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
253License Version 2.
254
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000255Core and builtins
256-----------------
257
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000258- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
259 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
260 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
261 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
262 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
263 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
264 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
265 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
266 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
267 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
268
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000269- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000270
271Extension Modules
272-----------------
273
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000274- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
275 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
276 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
277 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000278
279Library
280-------
281
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000282- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
283 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
284 returned.
285
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000286- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
287
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000288- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
289 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
290
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000291- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
292
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000293- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
294 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000295
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000296- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
297
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000298- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
299
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000300- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000301 the source code is updated and reloaded.
302
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000303Build
304-----
305
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000306- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000307
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000308What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
309================================
310
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000311*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000312
313Core and builtins
314-----------------
315
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000316- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000317 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
318
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000319- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
320 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
321 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
322 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
323
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000324- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
325 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
326
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000327- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
328 constant.
329
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000330- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
331 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
332 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
333 large), and to anomalies such as
334 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
335 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
336 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
337 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000338
339Extension modules
340-----------------
341
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000342- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
343 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000344 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
345 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
346 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000347
348Library
349-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000350
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000351- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000352 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000353 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
354 --swig-cpp.
355
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000356- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
357 it is set.
358
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000359- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000360
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000361- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
362 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
363 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
364 Closes bug #1039270.
365
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000366- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000367
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000368 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000369 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
370 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
371 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
372 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
373 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
374 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
375 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
376 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
377 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
378 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
379 + Updates to documentation.
380
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000381- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
382 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
383 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
384 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
385
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000386- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000387
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000388- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
389 applications should use the getmember function.
390
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000391- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
392
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000393- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
394 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
395 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
396 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
397 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
398 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
399 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
400 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
401 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
402
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000403- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
404 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000405 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000406
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000407- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
408 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
409 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
410 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
411 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
412 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
413 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
414 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000415
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000416- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
417 the new public features (of which there are many).
418
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000419- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000420 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
421 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
422 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
423 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000424 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000425
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000426- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
427
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000428- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
429 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
430 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
431 options.
432
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000433- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
434 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
435 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
436 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
437 conditions under which non-string values work.
438
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000439Build
440-----
441
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000442- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
443 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
444 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
445
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000446- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
447 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
448 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
449 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
450 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000451
452C API
453-----
454
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000455- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
456 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
457
458- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
459
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000460- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
461 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
462 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
463 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
464 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
465 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
466 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
467 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
468 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
469
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000470- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
471
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000472- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
473 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
474 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000475
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000476Tests
477-----
478
479- test__locale ported to unittest
480
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000481Mac
482---
483
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000484- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
485 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
486 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000487
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000488Tools/Demos
489-----------
490
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000491- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
492 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
493 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
494 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
495 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000496
497
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000498What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
499=================================
500
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000501*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000502
503Core and builtins
504-----------------
505
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000506- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000507 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
508
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000509- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
510 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
511 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
512 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
513 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
514 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
515 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
516 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000517 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
518 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
519 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
520 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
521 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000522
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000523- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
524 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
525 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
526 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
527 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
528
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000529- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
530
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000531- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
532 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
533
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000534- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
535 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
536 modified the list.
537
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000538- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
539 functions is now writable.
540
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000541- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
542 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
543 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
544 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
545
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000546- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
547 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
548 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
549 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
550 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000551
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000552- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
553 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
554
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000555Extension modules
556-----------------
557
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000558- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
559
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000560- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
561 data.
562
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000563- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
564 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
565 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
566 supposed to have been truncated away.
567
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000568- Added socket.socketpair().
569
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000570- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
571 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
572
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000573- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000574 versions of Python, have now been removed.
575
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000576Library
577-------
578
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000579- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000580 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000581
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000582- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
583 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
584
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000585- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
586 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
587
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000588- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
589
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000590- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
591 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000592
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000593- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
594 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
595
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000596- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
597
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000598- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
599
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000600- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
601
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000602- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
603 Percivall.
604
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000605- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
606 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
607
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000608- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
609 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
610 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000611 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000612
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000613- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
614 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
615 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
616 and exponent.
617
618- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
619
620- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
621 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
622 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
623
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000624- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
625 to the readline module.
626
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000627- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000628 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
629 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000630
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000631- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
632 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
633 contains symlinks.
634
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000635- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
636 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
637
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000638- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
639 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
640 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
641
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000642- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
643 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
644 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
645 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
646 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
647 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
648 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
649 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
650 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
651 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
652 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
653 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
654 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
655
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000656- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
657
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000658Tools/Demos
659-----------
660
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000661- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
662 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
663
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000664- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
665
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000666Build
667-----
668
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000669- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
670 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
671 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
672 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
673 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
674 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
675 plans to do so.
676
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000677- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
678 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
679
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000680- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
681 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
682
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000683- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
684 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
685
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000686- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
687 GNU/k*BSD systems.
688
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000689- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
690 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
691
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000692C API
693-----
694
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000695..
696
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000697Documentation
698-------------
699
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000700- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
701 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
702
703- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
704 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
705 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000706
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000707New platforms
708-------------
709
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000710- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
711
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000712Tests
713-----
714
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000715..
716
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000717Windows
718-------
719
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000720- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
721 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
722 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
723 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
724 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
725 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
726 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
727 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
728 the problem.
729
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000730Mac
731---
732
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000733..
734
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000735
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000736What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
737=================================
738
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000739*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000740
741Core and builtins
742-----------------
743
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000744- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
745 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
746 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
747 sensitive code.
748
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000749- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000750 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000751
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000752 @staticmethod
753 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000754
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000755 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000756
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000757- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
758 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
759 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
760 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
761 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
762 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
763 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
764 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
765 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
766 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
767 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
768
769 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
770 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
771 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
772 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
773 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
774 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
775 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
776
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000777- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
778 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
779
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000780- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000781 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000782
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000783- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000784 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000785 which was missing for no apparent reason.
786
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000787- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000788 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
789 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
790
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000791- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
792 types that support garbage collection.
793
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000794- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
795
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000796- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
797 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
798 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
799 Jython.
800
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000801- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
802
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000803- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
804 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
805
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000806- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
807 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
808 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000809
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000810- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
811 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
812 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
813
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000814Extension modules
815-----------------
816
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000817- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
818
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000819Library
820-------
821
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000822- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
823 TIS-620
824
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000825- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
826 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
827 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
828 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
829 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
830 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
831 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
832 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
833 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
834 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
835
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000836- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
837
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000838- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
839 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
840 same as when the argument is omitted).
841 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
842
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000843- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
844
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000845- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
846 schemes are offered.
847
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000848- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
849
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000850- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
851 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
852 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
853
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000854- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
855
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000856- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
857 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
858
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000859- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
860 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
861 when dummy_threading is being used.
862
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000863- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
864 from a tarfile.
865
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000866- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000867 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000868
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000869- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
870 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
871 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
872 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
873
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000874- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
875 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
876
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000877- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
878 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
879 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
880 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
881 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
882 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
883 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
884 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
885 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
886 by some other method in progress).
887
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000888- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
889 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
890 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000891
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000892- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
893
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000894- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
895 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
896 AM Kuchling.
897
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000898- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
899 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
900 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
901
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000902- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
903 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
904 instead of unsigned.
905
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000906- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000907 no longer part of the public API.
908
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000909- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
910 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
911 string methods of the same name).
912
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000913- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000914 SF patch 945642.
915
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000916- doctest unittest integration improvements:
917
918 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
919
920 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
921 DocTestSuites.
922
923- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
924 that provide thread-local data.
925
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000926- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
927 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
928
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000929- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
930
931- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
932 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
933 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
934
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000935- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
936
937 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
938 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
939 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000940
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000941 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
942 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
943 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
944 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
945
946 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
947 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
948
949 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
950 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
951 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
952 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
953
954 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
955 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
956 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
957 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
958 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
959
960 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
961 wrapping help output.
962
963 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
964 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
965 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000966
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000967C API
968-----
969
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000970- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
971 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
972 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
973 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
974 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
975 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
976 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
977 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
978 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
979 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
980 its visible semantics have not changed.
981
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000982- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
983 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
984
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000985Documentation
986-------------
987
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000988- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000989
990 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000991 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000992
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000993 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000994
995 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
996
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000997- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000998
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000999Tests
1000-----
1001
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001002- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001003 platforms that use the Makefile.
1004
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001005- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1006 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1007 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1008
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001009
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001010What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1011=================================
1012
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001013*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001014
1015Core and builtins
1016-----------------
1017
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001018- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1019 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1020 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1021 objects now (one object instead of three).
1022
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001023- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1024 Windows DLLs.
1025
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001026- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1027 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001028
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001029- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1030 a new .pyc magic.
1031
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001032- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1033 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1034 be there.
1035
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001036- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1037 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1038 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1039
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001040- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1041 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1042 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1043
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001044- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1045
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001046- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1047 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1048 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001049
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001050- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1051 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1052
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001053- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1054
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001055- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001056 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001057
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001058- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1059
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001060- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1061
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001062- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1063 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1064
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001065- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1066 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1067 Fixes bug #858016 .
1068
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001069- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1070 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1071 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1072
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001073- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1074 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1075 improves their performance (about 35%).
1076
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001077- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1078 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1079 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1080
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001081- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1082 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1083 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1084 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1085
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001086- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1087 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1088 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1089 length is not known).
1090
1091- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1092 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001093 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1094 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001095 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1096
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001097- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1098 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1099
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001100- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1101 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1102 keyword arguments.
1103
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001104- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1105 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1106 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1107
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001108- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1109 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1110 cases.
1111
1112- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1113 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1114 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1115 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1116 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1117 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1118 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1119 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1120 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1121 a release build.
1122
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001123- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1124 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1125
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001126- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001127 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001128
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001129- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1130 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1131 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1132 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1133 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1134 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1135 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1136 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1137 destroyed.
1138
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001139- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1140 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1141 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1142 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1143 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1144 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1145 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1146 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1147
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001148- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1149 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1150 character other than a space.
1151
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001152- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1153 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1154 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1155 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1156 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1157 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1158 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1159 attributes with the same name.
1160
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001161- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1162 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1163 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1164 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1165 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1166 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1167 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1168 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1169 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1170 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1171 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1172 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1173 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1174 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001175
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001176- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1177 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1178 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1179 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1180 This has been repaired.
1181
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001182- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1183
1184- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1185
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001186- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1187 over a sequence.
1188
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001189- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001190 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001191
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001192- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1193
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001194- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1195 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1196 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1197 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1198 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1199 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1200 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1201 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1202
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001203- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1204 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1205 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1206
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001207- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1208 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1209 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1210 freelist.
1211
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001212- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1213 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1214
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001215- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1216 number.
1217
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001218- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1219 a TypeError exception.
1220
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001221- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1222 820195.
1223
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001224- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1225 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1226 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1227
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001228- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001229 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1230 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001231
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001232- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1233 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1234 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1235
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001236- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1237 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001238 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001239
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001240- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001241 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1242 the first call.
1243
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001244
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001245Extension modules
1246-----------------
1247
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001248- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1249 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1250
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001251- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1252 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1253 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1254 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1255 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1256 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1257 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001258
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001259- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1260
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001261- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1262
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001263- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1264 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1265
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001266- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1267 fewer false positives.
1268
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001269- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1270 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1271
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001272- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001273 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1274
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001275- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001276 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001277 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001278 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1279 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001280
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001281- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1282 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1283 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1284 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1285
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001286- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1287 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1288 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1289 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1290 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1291 #897625.
1292
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001293- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1294 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1295
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001296- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1297 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1298 and pops on either side of the deque.
1299
1300- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1301 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1302
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001303- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1304 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1305 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1306 other functions that expect a function argument.
1307
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001308- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1309
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001310- os.getsid was added.
1311
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001312- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1313 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1314 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1315
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001316- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1317
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001318- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1319
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001320- readline.clear_history was added.
1321
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001322- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1323
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001324- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1325
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001326- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1327
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001328- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1329
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001330- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1331
1332- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1333
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001334- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1335
1336- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1337
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001338- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1339 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1340 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1341
1342- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1343 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1344 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1345 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1346 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1347 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1348 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1349
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001350- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1351 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1352 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1353 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001354
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001355- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001356 iterators from a single iterable.
1357
1358- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1359 of raising a TypeError exception.
1360
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001361- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1362 as parameter.
1363
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001364Library
1365-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001366
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001367- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1368 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1369 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001370
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001371- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1372 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1373 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001374
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001375- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001376
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001377- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1378 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001379
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001380- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1381 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1382
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001383- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1384
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001385- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001386 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001387
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001388- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001389 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001390
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001391- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1392
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001393- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1394 on cygwin and mingw32.
1395
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001396- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1397
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001398- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1399 module.
1400
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001401- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1402 installation scheme for all platforms.
1403
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001404- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001405 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001406
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001407- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1408 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1409 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1410
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001411- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1412 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1413 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1414
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001415- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1416
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001417- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1418
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001419- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1420 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1421
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001422- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1423 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1424 type pattern with the same value exists.
1425
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001426- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1427 when run from the command prompt).
1428
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001429- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1430 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1431
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001432- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1433 default sort).
1434
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001435- Added global runctx function to profile module
1436
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001437- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1438
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001439- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1440
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001441- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1442
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001443- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001444 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1445 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1446 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1447 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1448 accordingly.
1449
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001450- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1451 decoding standards.
1452
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001453- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1454 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1455 called for all requests.
1456
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001457- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1458 they are passed to the compiler.
1459
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001460- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1461 indent, width and depth.
1462
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001463- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1464 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1465
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001466- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1467 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1468
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001469- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1470
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001471- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1472
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001473- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1474
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001475- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1476 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1477
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001478- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001479 for better performance.
1480
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001481- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001482
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001483- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1484 a string).
1485
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001486- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1487
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001488- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1489
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001490- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1491
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001492- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1493
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001494- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1495 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1496 list of fieldnames.
1497
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001498- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1499 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1500
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001501- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1502
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001503- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1504 empty lists.
1505
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001506- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1507 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1508 and shelves.
1509
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001510- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1511 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1512
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001513- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001514 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1515 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001516
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001517- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1518 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001519 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001520
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001521- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001522 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1523 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1524
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001525- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1526 and removed in Py2.4.
1527
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001528- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1529
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001530- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1531
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001532Tools/Demos
1533-----------
1534
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001535- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1536 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1537
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001538- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1539
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001540- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1541 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1542 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1543 destination in situations where both files are given.
1544
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001545- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1546 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1547 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1548 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1549
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001550- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1551
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001552- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1553 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1554 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1555 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1556 now.
1557
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001558- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1559 in effect
1560
1561- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1562 C-c C-h
1563
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001564- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1565 -d option was given.
1566
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001567Build
1568-----
1569
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001570- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1571 build under OS X.
1572
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001573- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1574 --enable-profiling.
1575
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001576- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1577 is configured --with-tsc.
1578
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001579- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1580 on AMD64.
1581
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001582- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1583 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1584
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001585- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1586 removed.
1587
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001588- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1589 supported (see PEP 11).
1590
1591- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1592
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001593- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1594
1595- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1596 (see PEP 11).
1597
1598- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1599 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1600
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001601C API
1602-----
1603
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001604- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1605 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1606 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1607
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001608- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1609 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1610 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1611 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1612
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001613- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1614 generator objects.
1615
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001616- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1617 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001618 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1619 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001620
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001621- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1622 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1623
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001624- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1625 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1626 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1627 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1628 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1629
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001630- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1631 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1632 about 10% faster.
1633
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001634- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1635 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1636
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001637- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1638 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1639 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1640 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1641
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001642Windows
1643-------
1644
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001645- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1646 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1647 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1648 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1649
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001650- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1651 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1652 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1653
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001654
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001655What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1656===============================
1657
1658*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1659
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001660IDLE
1661----
1662
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001663- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1664 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1665 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1666 context-menu actions.
1667
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001668- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1669 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1670 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1671 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1672 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1673 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1674 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1675 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1676 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1677
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001678
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001679What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1680=============================================
1681
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001682*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001683
1684Core and builtins
1685-----------------
1686
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001687- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001688 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001689 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1690
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001691Extension modules
1692-----------------
1693
1694- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1695 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1696 than once. This has been fixed.
1697
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001698- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1699 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1700 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1701 call.
1702
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001703- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1704
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001705Library
1706-------
1707
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001708- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1709 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1710
1711- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1712 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1713 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1714 restored.
1715
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001716IDLE
1717----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001718
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001719- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001720
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001721Build
1722-----
1723
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001724- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1725 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1726
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001727C API
1728-----
1729
1730Windows
1731-------
1732
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001733- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1734 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1735
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001736- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1737
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001738Mac
1739---
1740
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001741- Various fixes to pimp.
1742
1743- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1744
1745- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1746 more problems than it solves.
1747
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001748
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001749What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1750=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001751
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001752*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1753
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001754Core and builtins
1755-----------------
1756
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001757- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1758 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1759
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001760- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1761 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001762 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001763
1764- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1765 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1766 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001767 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001768
1769- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1770 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001771
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001772- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1773 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1774 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1775
1776- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001777 770247.
1778
1779- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001780
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001781Extension modules
1782-----------------
1783
1784- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1785 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1786
1787- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1788
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001789- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1790
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001791- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1792 contained within the _strptime module.
1793
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001794- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1795 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1796
1797- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001798 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1799
1800- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1801 the find_class attribute, if present.
1802
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001803- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001804
1805 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1806 (SF bug 763298).
1807
1808 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001809 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1810 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1811 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001812
1813 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1814
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001815Library
1816-------
1817
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001818- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1819
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001820- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1821 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1822 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1823 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1824 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1825 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1826 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1827 or Tester().
1828
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001829- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1830 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1831 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1832 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1833 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1834 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1835 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1836 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1837 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001838
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001839 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001840
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001841- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1842 weren't before was an oversight.
1843
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001844- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1845 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1846
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001847- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1848 when there are no lines.
1849
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001850- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1851 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1852
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001853- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1854 to child processes.
1855
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001856- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1857
1858- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1859
1860- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1861 xmlrpclib.
1862
1863- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1864 responses.
1865
1866- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1867 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1868
1869- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1870 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1871 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1872
1873- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1874 used as patterns.
1875
1876- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1877 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1878 than Tk 8.3.
1879
1880- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1881
1882- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001883
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001884Tools/Demos
1885-----------
1886
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001887- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1888
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001889- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1890
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001891- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001892
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001893Build
1894-----
1895
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001896- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1897
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001898- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1899
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001900- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1901 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001902
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001903- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1904 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1905 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001906
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001907C API
1908-----
1909
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001910- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1911 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1912
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001913Windows
1914-------
1915
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001916- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1917 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1918 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1919 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1920 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1921 Python exception ::
1922
1923 thread.error: can't start new thread
1924
1925 is raised now.
1926
1927- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1928 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1929 instead of from DLL teardown.
1930
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001931Mac
1932---
1933
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001934- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001935 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001936 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1937 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1938 the executable in the bundle.
1939
1940- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001941
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001942- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1943
1944- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1945 on Panther.
1946
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001947What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1948================================
1949
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001950*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001951
1952Core and builtins
1953-----------------
1954
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001955- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1956 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1957 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1958 with the -i option.
1959
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001960- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1961 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1962
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001963- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1964 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1965
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001966- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1967 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1968 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1969 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1970 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1971 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1972 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1973 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1974 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1975 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1976 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1977 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1978 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001979
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001980- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1981 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1982 embedded in a lambda expression.
1983
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001984- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1985 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1986 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1987 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1988 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1989
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001990- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1991 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1992 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1993
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001994- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1995 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1996
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001997- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1998 It's writable again.
1999
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002000- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2001 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2002 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002003 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002004
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002005- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2006 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2007 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2008
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002009Extension modules
2010-----------------
2011
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002012- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2013 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2014
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002015- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2016 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2017 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2018 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2019
2020- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2021 collection.
2022
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002023- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2024 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2025 unique within a single program run.
2026
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002027- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2028 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2029
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002030- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2031 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2032
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002033- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2034 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002035
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002036- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2037
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002038- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2039 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2040
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002041- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2042 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2043 for many BSD-derived systems.
2044
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002045
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002046Library
2047-------
2048
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002049- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2050 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2051 primary ones:
2052
2053 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2054 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2055 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2056
2057 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2058 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2059 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2060 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2061 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2062 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2063
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002064- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2065 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2066 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2067 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2068 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2069 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2070 argument.
2071
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002072- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2073 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2074 in the archive.
2075
2076- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2077 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2078
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002079- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2080 569574).
2081
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002082- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2083 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2084 no more.
2085
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002086- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2087 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2088 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2089 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2090 code coverage.
2091
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002092- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2093 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2094 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002095 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2096 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002097
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002098- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2099 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2100 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002101 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002102
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002103- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2104
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002105- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2106 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2107 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2108 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2109
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002110- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2111 handling.
2112
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002113- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2114 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2115
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002116- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2117 in socket.py.
2118
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002119- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2120
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002121- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2122 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2123 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2124 opener with proxy support.
2125
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002126- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2127
2128- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2129
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002130Tools/Demos
2131-----------
2132
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002133- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2134
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002135- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2136
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002137- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2138 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002139
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002140- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2141 files.
2142
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002143Build
2144-----
2145
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002146- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002147 different root directory.
2148
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002149C API
2150-----
2151
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002152- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2153 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2154 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2155 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2156 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2157 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2158 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2159 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2160 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2161 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2162
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002163- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2164 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2165 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2166 from Python.
2167
2168
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002169New platforms
2170-------------
2171
2172None this time.
2173
2174Tests
2175-----
2176
2177- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2178 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2179
2180Windows
2181-------
2182
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002183- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2184
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002185- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2186 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2187 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2188 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2189 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2190 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2191 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2192 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2193 that's what it's for.
2194
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002195Mac
2196---
2197
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002198- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2199 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2200 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2201 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002202- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2203 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2204- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002205
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002206SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2207------------------------------------
2208
2209430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2210598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2211622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2212661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2213683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2214697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2215713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2216724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2217727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2218729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2219730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2220731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2221732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2222733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2223735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2224740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2225744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2226745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2227747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2228749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2229751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2230753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2231755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2232757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2233760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2234
2235
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002236What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2237================================
2238
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002239*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002240
2241Core and builtins
2242-----------------
2243
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002244- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2245 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2246
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002247- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2248 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2249 and cannot be strings).
2250
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002251- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2252 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2253 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2254 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2255
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002256- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2257 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2258 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2259 Python itself.
2260
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002261- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2262 the referenced object, if it has one.
2263
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002264- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2265 the thread started at
2266 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2267
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002268- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2269 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2270 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2271 placed on a list index.
2272
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002273- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2274 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2275 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2276 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2277
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002278- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2279 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2280 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2281 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2282 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2283 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2284 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2285
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002286- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2287 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2288 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2289 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2290 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2291
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002292- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2293 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002294
2295- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2296 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2297 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2298 #693195.)
2299
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002300- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2301 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002302
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002303- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002304 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002305 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2306 interpreter executions, would fail.
2307
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002308- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002309 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002310 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002311
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002312Extension modules
2313-----------------
2314
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002315- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2316 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2317 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2318 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2319
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002320- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2321 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2322
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002323- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2324 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2325 and Greg Chapman.)
2326
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002327- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2328 recursively.
2329
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002330- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002331 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2332 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2333 leaks.
2334
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002335- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2336
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002337- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2338 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2339 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2340 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2341 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2342 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2343 #705836.
2344
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002345- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002346 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2347
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002348- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2349 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2350 See SF bug #692416.
2351
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002352- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2353 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2354
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002355- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2356 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2357 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002358
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002359- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002360 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2361 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2362
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002363- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2364 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2365 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2366 timeouts to work properly.
2367
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002368Library
2369-------
2370
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002371- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2372 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2373 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2374 future release.
2375
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002376- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2377 for querying platform dependent features.
2378
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002379- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002380
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002381- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2382 pickle protocol versions.
2383
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002384- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2385 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2386 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2387
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002388- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2389
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002390- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2391 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2392 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2393 modules.
2394
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002395- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2396 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2397 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2398
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002399- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2400 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2401
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002402- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2403 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2404 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2405
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002406- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002407 MS Office extensions.
2408
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002409- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2410 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2411
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002412- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2413 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2414
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002415- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2416 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2417 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2418 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2419 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2420 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2421
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002422- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2423 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2424 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002425
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002426- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2427 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2428 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2429
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002430- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2431
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002432- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2433 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2434 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2435
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002436Tools/Demos
2437-----------
2438
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002439- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2440 See the module docstring for details.
2441
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002442Build
2443-----
2444
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002445- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2446 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002447
2448C API
2449-----
2450
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002451- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2452
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002453- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2454 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2455 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2456
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002457- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2458 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002459
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002460 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2461 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2462 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002463
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002464- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002465 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2466
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002467- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2468 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2469 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002470
2471New platforms
2472-------------
2473
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002474None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002475
2476Tests
2477-----
2478
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002479- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2480 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002481
2482Windows
2483-------
2484
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002485- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2486 function.
2487
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002488- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2489 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002490
2491Mac
2492---
2493
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002494- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2495 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002496
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002497- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2498 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002499
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002500- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2501 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2502 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002503
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002504- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002505 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2506 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002507
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002508- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2509 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002510
2511
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002512What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2513=================================
2514
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002515*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002516
2517Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002518-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002519
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002520- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2521 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2522 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2523
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002524- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2525 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2526 (SF patch #664376.)
2527
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002528- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2529 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2530 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2531 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2532 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2533 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002534 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002535
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002536- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2537 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2538 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2539 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002540 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002541
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002542- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2543 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2544 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2545 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2546 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2547 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2548 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2549 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2550 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2551 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2552 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2553
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002554- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2555 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2556 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2557 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2558 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2559 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2560
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002561- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2562 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2563
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002564- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2565 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2566 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2567 case.)
2568
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002569- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2570 passed as unicode strings.
2571
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002572- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2573 See SF bug #683467.
2574
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002575- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2576 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2577
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002578- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2579
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002580- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2581
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002582- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2583 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2584 arguments.
2585
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002586- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2587 See SF bug #667147.
2588
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002589- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002590 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002591 See SF bug #676155.
2592
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002593- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002594 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002595 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2596 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2597 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2598 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2599 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2600 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002601
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002602Extension modules
2603-----------------
2604
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002605- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2606 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2607 tp_as_number pointer.
2608
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002609- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2610 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2611 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2612 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2613 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2614
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002615- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2616
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002617- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2618
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002619- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002620 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002621 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2622 patch #678531.)
2623
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002624- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2625 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2626
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002627- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2628 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2629
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002630- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2631
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002632- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2633 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2634 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2635
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002636- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2637
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002638- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2639 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2640
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002641- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002642
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002643- datetime changes:
2644
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002645 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2646
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002647 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2648 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2649 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2650 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2651 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2652 now.
2653
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002654 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002655 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2656 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002657
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002658 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002659 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002660 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2661 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2662 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2663 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002664
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002665 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2666 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2667 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002668 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2669
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002670 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2671 by a later example coded by Guido.
2672
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002673 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002674 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2675 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2676 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002677 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2678 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2679
2680 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2681 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2682 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2683 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2684 tzinfo subclass instance.
2685
2686 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2687 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2688 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2689 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2690 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2691 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2692 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2693 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002694
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002695 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2696 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2697 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2698 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2699 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002700 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2701
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002702 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002703
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002704 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2705 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2706 as a naive datetime object.
2707
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002708 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2709 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2710 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2711
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002712 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2713 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2714 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2715 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2716 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2717 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2718 comparison.
2719
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002720 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2721 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2722 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2723 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002724 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002725
2726 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002727
2728 and ::
2729
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002730 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2731
2732 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2733 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2734 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2735 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2736
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002737 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2738 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2739 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2740 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2741 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2742
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002743 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2744 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002745 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2746 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002747
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002748Library
2749-------
2750
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002751- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2752 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2753
2754- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2755 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2756 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2757 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2758 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2759 See PEP 307 for details.
2760
2761- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2762 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2763
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002764- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2765 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002766 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002767 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2768 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002769 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002770
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002771- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2772 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2773
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002774- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2775 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2776 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2777
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002778- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2779
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002780- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2781 exception.
2782
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002783- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2784 class.
2785
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002786- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2787 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2788 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2789
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002790- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2791 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2792
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002793- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002794 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2795 See SF bug #659228.
2796
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002797- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2798 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2799 See SF patch #651082.
2800
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002801- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002802
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002803- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2804 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2805
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002806- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002807 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002808
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002809- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2810 DOS paths from other platforms.
2811
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002812Tools/Demos
2813-----------
2814
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002815- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2816 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2817 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2818 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2819 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2820 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2821 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2822 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2823 example:
2824
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002825 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2826 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002827
2828 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2829
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002830
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002831Build
2832-----
2833
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002834- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2835 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2836 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002837 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2838
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002839 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2840
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002841- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2842 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2843 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2844 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2845 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2846 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2847 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2848 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2849 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2850
2851- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2852 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2853 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2854 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2855
2856- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2857 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2858
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002859C API
2860-----
2861
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002862- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2863 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002864
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002865- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2866 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2867 tp_as_number pointer.
2868
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002869- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2870 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2871 (SF #681367)
2872
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002873- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2874 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2875 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2876 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002877
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002878Tests
2879-----
2880
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002881- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002882 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2883 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2884 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2885 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2886 pydoc.)
2887
2888- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2889
2890- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002891
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002892Windows
2893-------
2894
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002895- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2896 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2897 time).
2898
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002899- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2900 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2901
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002902- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2903 release without strong cryptography.
2904
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002905- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002906 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002907
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002908- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2909 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2910
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002911Mac
2912---
2913
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002914- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2915 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002916
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002917- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2918 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2919 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002920
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002921- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2922 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002923
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002924- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2925 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2926 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2927 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002928
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002929- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002930 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2931 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2932 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002933
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002934
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002935What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002936=================================
2937
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002938*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002939
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002940Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002941--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002942
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002943- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2944
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002945- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2946 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002947 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002948 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002949 a different meaning than before.
2950
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002951- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002952 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002953 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002954
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002955- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002956 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002957 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002958
2959- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2960 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2961 and deallocation.
2962
2963- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2964 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2965
2966- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2967 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2968 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2969 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2970 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2971
2972- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2973 now detected by the garbage collector.
2974
2975- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2976 [SF bug 519621]
2977
2978- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2979 identifier.
2980
2981- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2982 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2983 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2984 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2985 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2986 [SF bug 563060]
2987
2988- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2989 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2990 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2991 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2992 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2993
2994- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2995 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2996 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2997
2998- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2999
3000- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3001 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3002 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3003 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3004 state of the slots would be lost.)
3005
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003006Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003007-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003008
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003009- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003010 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3011 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3012 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3013 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003014 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3015 Jython 2.1.
3016
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003017- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003018 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003019 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3020 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3021 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3022 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3023 these, see PEP 302.
3024
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003025- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3026 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3027 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3028
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003029- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3030 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3031 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3032
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003033- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3034 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3035 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3036
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003037- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3038 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3039 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3040 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3041 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3042 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3043 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3044 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3045 releases or implementations.
3046
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003047- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003048 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3049 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003050
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003051- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3052 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3053
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003054- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3055 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3056 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3057
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003058- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3059 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3060
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003061- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3062 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003063 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3064 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003065
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003066- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3067 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3068 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3069 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3070 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3071
3072 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3073 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3074 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3075 pattern.
3076
3077 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3078 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3079 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3080 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3081
3082 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3083 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3084 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3085 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3086 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3087 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3088
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003089- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3090 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3091 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3092 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3093 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3094 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3095 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3096 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003097
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003098- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3099 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3100 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3101 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3102 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003103 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3104 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3105 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3106 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3107 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3108 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3109 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003110
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003111- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3112 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3113
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003114- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3115 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3116 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3117 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3118 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3119 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3120 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3121 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3122 to Zack Weinberg!
3123
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003124- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3125 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3126 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3127 type. This has been fixed now.
3128
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003129- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3130 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3131 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3132
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003133- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3134 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3135 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3136 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3137 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3138 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3139 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3140 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003141 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003142
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003143- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3144 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3145 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003146
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003147- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3148 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3149 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3150 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3151 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3152 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3153 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3154 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003155 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003156 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3157 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3158
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003159- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3160 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3161 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3162 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3163 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3164 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3165 this.)
3166
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003167- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3168 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003169 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003170 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003171 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3172 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003173 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3174 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003175
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003176- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3177 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3178 currently running.
3179
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003180- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3181 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3182 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3183 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3184
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003185- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3186 as directory names.
3187
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003188- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3189 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3190
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003191- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3192 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3193
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003194- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003195 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3196 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003197
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003198- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3199 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3200 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3201 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3202 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3203
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003204- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3205 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3206 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3207 removed.
3208
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003209- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3210 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3211 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3212
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003213- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3214 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3215 to __debug__.
3216
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003217- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3218 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3219 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3220
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003221- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3222 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3223 deprecated now.
3224
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003225- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3226 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3227 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003228
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003229- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3230 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3231 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3232 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3233 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003234
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003235- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3236 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3237
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003238- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3239 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3240 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003241 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003242 is backward compatible.
3243
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003244- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3245 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3246 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3247 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3248 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3249
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003250- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3251 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3252 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3253 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3254 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3255 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003256
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003257- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3258 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3259
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003260- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3261 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3262
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003263- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3264 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3265 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3266 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3267 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3268
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003269- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3270 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3271 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3272
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003273- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003274 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3275
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003276- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3277 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3278 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003279
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003280- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3281 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3282
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003283- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3284 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3285 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3286
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003287- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3288
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003289Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003290-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003291
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003292- Added three operators to the operator module:
3293 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3294 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3295 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3296
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003297- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3298
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003299- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3300 archives.
3301
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003302- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3303 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3304 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3305
3306 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3307
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003308- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3309 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3310 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003311 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003312
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003313- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3314 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3315 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3316 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003317 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3318 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3319 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3320 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003321
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003322- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3323 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003324
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003325- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3326
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003327- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3328 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3329
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003330- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3331 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3332 supported.
3333
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003334- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3335
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003336- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3337 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003338
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003339- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3340 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3341
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003342- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3343
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003344- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3345 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3346
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003347- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3348 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3349 functions but callable type objects.
3350
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003351- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003352 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003353 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003354
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003355- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3356 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003357
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003358- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3359 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003360
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003361- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3362 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3363 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3364 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3365
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003366- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3367 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003368
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003369- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3370 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3371 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3372 and __imul__.
3373
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003374- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003375 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3376 is called.
3377
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003378- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3379 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3380 interpreter was compiled.
3381
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003382- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3383 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3384 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003385 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003386 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3387 1, not 2.
3388
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003389- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3390 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3391 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3392 limit.
3393
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003394- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3395 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3396 bug #623464.
3397
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003398- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3399 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3400 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3401 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3402
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003403Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003404-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003405
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003406- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3407
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003408- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3409 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3410 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3411 with Python 2.3a2.
3412
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003413- os.path exposes getctime.
3414
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003415- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003416 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003417 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003418 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003419 unit tests of floating point results.
3420
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003421- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3422 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3423 has been increased.
3424
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003425- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3426 executed.
3427
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003428- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3429 postinstallation script.
3430
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003431- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3432 test the current module.
3433
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003434- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003435 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3436 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3437 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3438 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3439
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003440- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003441 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003442 Ward's Optik package.
3443
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003444- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3445 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3446 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3447 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3448
3449- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3450 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003451 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003452
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003453- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3454 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3455 shelf are binary pickles.
3456
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003457- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3458 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3459
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003460- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3461 modules are iterators now.
3462
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003463- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3464 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3465 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3466 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3467 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3468 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003469
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003470- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3471 with their entity value.
3472
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003473- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3474
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003475- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3476 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003477
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003478- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3479 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003480 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003481
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003482- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3483 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3484 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3485 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3486 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3487 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3488 main():
3489
3490 import locale
3491 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3492
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003493- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3494 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3495
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003496- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3497 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3498 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3499 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3500 to the new standard.
3501
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003502- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3503 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3504 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3505 an extension to the database.
3506
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003507- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3508 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3509 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3510 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003511 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003512
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003513- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003514 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003515
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003516- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3517 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3518 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3519 bounded integers.
3520
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003521- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3522 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3523 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3524 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3525 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3526 in existence.
3527
3528 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3529 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3530 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3531 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3532 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3533 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3534
3535 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3536 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3537 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3538 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3539
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003540- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3541 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3542 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3543
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003544- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3545
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003546- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3547 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3548 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3549 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3550
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003551- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3552 argument.
3553
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003554- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3555 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3556 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3557 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3558 [SF patch 560794].
3559
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003560- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3561 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3562 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003563 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3564 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3565 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003566
3567- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3568 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003569
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003570- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3571 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3572 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3573 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003574
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003575- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3576 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3577 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3578 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3579 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3580
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003581- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003582
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003583- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3584
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003585- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3586 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3587 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3588 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3589 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3590 identical to None.
3591
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003592- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3593 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3594 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3595 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3596 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3597 results now.
3598
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003599- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3600 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3601
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003602- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3603 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3604 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3605 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3606 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3607 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3608 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3609 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3610
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003611- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3612
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003613- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3614 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3615
3616- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3617 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3618 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3619 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3620 and other systems.
3621
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003622- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3623 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3624 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3625 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 +00003626 work well with these.
3627
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003628- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3629
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003630- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003631 connections.
3632
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003633- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3634 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3635 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3636
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003637- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3638 sets
3639
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003640- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3641 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3642 name.
3643
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003644- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3645 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3646 passed in.
3647
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003648- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003649 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003650 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3651 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003652
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003653- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3654
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003655- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3656
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003657- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3658 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3659 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3660
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003661- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3662 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3663 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3664 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003665 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003666
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003667- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003668 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003669 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003670
3671- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3672 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3673 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3674
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003675- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003676 the value of its expression argument.
3677
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003678- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3679 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3680 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3681
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003682- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3683 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3684 skipstone browser was included.
3685
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003686- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3687 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3688
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003689Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003690-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003691
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003692- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3693 names in addition to accepting file names.
3694
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003695- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3696 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3697 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3698 still used and useful.)
3699
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003700- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3701 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3702 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3703 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003704
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003705- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3706 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3707 the generated binary.
3708
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003709Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003710-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003711
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003712- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3713
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003714- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3715 except in the hands of experts.
3716
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003717- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003718 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3719 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3720 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003721
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003722- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3723 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3724 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3725 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3726 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3727 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3728 builds.
3729
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003730- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3731 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3732 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3733 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3734 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3735 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3736 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3737 new type.
3738
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003739- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003740
3741 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3742 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3743 positive infinities.
3744
3745 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3746 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3747 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3748 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3749 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3750 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3751 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3752
3753 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3754
3755 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3756
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003757- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3758 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3759 size of the executable.
3760
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003761- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3762 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3763 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3764 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003765
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003766- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3767
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003768- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3769 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3770 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003771
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003772- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3773 well as Unix.
3774
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003775- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3776 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3777 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3778 modules in the README file for details.
3779
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003780C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003781-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003782
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003783- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3784 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003785 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003786 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003787 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003788
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003789- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3790 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3791 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3792 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3793 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3794 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003795 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003796 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3797 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3798 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3799 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3800 aligned.)
3801
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003802- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3803 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3804 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3805
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003806- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3807 level.
3808
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003809- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3810 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3811 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3812 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3813 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3814
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003815- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3816 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3817 code.
3818
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003819- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3820 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3821 adjusting for negative indices.
3822
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003823- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3824 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3825 object.
3826
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003827- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3828 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3829 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3830
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003831- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3832 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003833
3834- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3835
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003836- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3837 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3838 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3839 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3840
3841- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3842
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003843- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003844
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003845- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003846 without going through the buffer API.
3847
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003848- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003849
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003850- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3851 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3852 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3853 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3854
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003855- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3856 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3857
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003858- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003859 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3860
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003861New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003862-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003863
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003864- OpenVMS is now supported.
3865
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003866- AtheOS is now supported.
3867
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003868- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3869
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003870- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3871
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003872Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003873-----
3874
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003875- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3876 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3877 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003878
3879Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003880-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003881
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003882- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3883 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3884 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3885 bugs.
3886 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003887 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003888 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3889 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003890 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003891
3892- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003893 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003894
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003895- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3896 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3897
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003898- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3899 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003900 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003901 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3902
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003903- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3904 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3905 use files" uninstall option).
3906
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003907- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3908
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003909- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3910 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3911
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003912- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3913 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3914 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3915
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003916- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3917 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3918 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3919 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3920 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003921 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3922 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3923 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003924
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003925- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003926 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003927 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3928 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3929 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3930 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3931 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3932 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3933 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3934 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3935 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3936 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3937 work around.
3938
3939- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3940 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3941 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3942 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3943 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3944 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3945 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3946 specified with O_CREAT too).
3947
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003948Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003949----
3950
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003951- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003952
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003953- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3954 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3955 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3956
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003957- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3958 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3959 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3960
3961- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3962 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3963 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3964 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3965 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3966 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3967 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3968 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003969
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003970- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3971 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3972 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003973
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003974- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3975 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3976 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3977 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3978 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003979
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003980- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3981 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3982 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003983
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003984- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3985 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003986
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003987- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3988 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3989 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3990 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3991 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003992
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003993- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3994 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3995 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3996
3997- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3998 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3999 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004000
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004001- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4002 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4003 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4004 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004005 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004006
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004007- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4008 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004009
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004010- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4011 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004012
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004013- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004014 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004015 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4016 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004017
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004018
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004019What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004020===============================
4021
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004022*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4023
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004024Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004025--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004026
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004027- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4028 with a custom metaclass.
4029
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004030Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004031-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004032
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004033- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4034 are proxies.
4035
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004036Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004037-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004038
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004039- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4040 very short strings.
4041
4042- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4043 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4044 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4045 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4046 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4047
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004048Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004049-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004050
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004051- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4052 close or delete time).
4053
4054- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4055 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4056
4057- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4058
4059- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004060 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004061
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004062Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004063-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004064
4065Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004066-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004067
4068C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004069-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004070
4071New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004072-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004073
4074Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004075-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004076
4077Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004078-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004079
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004080- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4081
4082- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4083 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4084
4085- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4086 deleted at process exit time.
4087
4088- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4089 in backslash.
4090
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004091Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004092----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004093
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004094- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4095 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4096 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4097
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004098
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004099What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004100===========================
4101
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004102*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4103
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004104Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004105--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004106
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004107- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4108 been extensively updated. See
4109
4110 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4111
4112 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4113
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004114- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4115 deleted!
4116
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004117- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4118 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4119 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4120 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4121 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4122
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004123- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4124
4125 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4126 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4127
4128 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4129 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4130 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4131 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4132 supported anyway.
4133
4134 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4135 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4136
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004137- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4138 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4139 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4140 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4141 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004142
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004143- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4144 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4145 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4146
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004147Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004148-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004149
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004150- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4151 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4152 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4153 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4154 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4155 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004156 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4157 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4158 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4159 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004160
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004161- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4162 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4163 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4164
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004165Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004166-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004167
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004168- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4169
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004170Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004171-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004172
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004173- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4174 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4175 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4176 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4177 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4178 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4179
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004180- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4181
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004182- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4183
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004184- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4185
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004186- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4187 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4188 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4189
4190- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4191
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004192Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004193-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004194
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004195- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4196 off a search on Google.
4197
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004198Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004199-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004200
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004201- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4202 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4203 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4204 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4205 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4206 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4207 other platforms should do likewise.
4208
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004209- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4210 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4211 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4212
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004213C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004214-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004215
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004216- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4217 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4218 producing key-value pairs.
4219
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004220- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004221 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004222 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4223 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4224 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4225 previously went unchallenged.
4226
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004227New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004228-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004229
4230Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004231-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004232
4233Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004234-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004235
4236Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004237----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004238
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004239- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4240 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004241
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004242- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4243 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4244 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4245 home.
4246
4247
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004248What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004249===========================
4250
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004251*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4252
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004253Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004254--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004255
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004256- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4257 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004258
4259 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004260 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004261
4262 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4263 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004264 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004265 This needs to be documented.
4266
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004267- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4268 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4269
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004270- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4271 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4272 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4273
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004274- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4275 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4276
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004277- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4278 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4279 class forbids it).
4280
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004281- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4282 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4283 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4284
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004285- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4286
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004287Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004288-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004289
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004290- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4291 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004292 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004293
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004294- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4295 (like 1 + '').
4296
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004297Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004298-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004299
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004300- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4301 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4302 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4303 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004304 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004305 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4306
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004307- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4308 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4309 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4310 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4311
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004312- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4313 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004314 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4315 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4316 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004317
4318- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4319 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004320
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004321- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4322 bytes on its input.
4323
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004324Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004325-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004326
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004327- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004328 convenience function.
4329
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004330- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4331 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4332 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004333 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4334 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4335 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4336 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4337 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4338 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004339
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004340- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4341 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4342 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4343 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4344
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004345- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4346 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4347 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4348
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004349- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4350 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4351 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4352 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4353
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004354- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4355 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004356 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004357 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4358 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4359 new -l and -e options.
4360
4361- statcache is now deprecated.
4362
4363- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4364 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004365 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004366 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4367 time properly taken into account.
4368
4369- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4370 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4371 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4372 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4373
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004374Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004375-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004376
4377Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004378-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004379
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004380- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4381 is built with libdb3 if available.
4382
4383- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4384
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004385C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004386-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004387
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004388- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4389 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4390 PySequence_Size().
4391
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004392- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4393
4394- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4395 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4396 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4397
4398- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4399 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4400
4401- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4402 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4403
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004404New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004405-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004406
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004407- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4408 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4409
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004410- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4411 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4412
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004413- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4414
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004415Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004416-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004417
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004418- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4419 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4420
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004421Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004422-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004423
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004424Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004425----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004426
4427- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4428 removed completely in the next release.
4429
4430- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4431 OSX.
4432
4433- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4434 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4435
4436- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4437
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004438
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004439What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004440===========================
4441
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004442*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4443
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004444Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004445--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004446
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004447- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004448 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004449 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004450 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4451 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004452 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4453 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004454 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4455 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004456
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004457- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4458 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4459
4460- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4461 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4462
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004463Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004464-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004465
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004466- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4467 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4468 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4469 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4470 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4471 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4472 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4473 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4474
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004475- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4476 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4477 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4478 example).
4479
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004480- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004481 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004482 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004483 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004484
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004485- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4486 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4487 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004488 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004489
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004490- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4491 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4492 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4493 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4494 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4495 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4496
4497 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4498
4499 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4500
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004501Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004502-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004503
4504- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4505
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004506- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4507
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004508- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4509 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004510
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004511- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4512 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4513 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4514 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4515 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4516 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004517 attributes.
4518
4519- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4520 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4521 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004522
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004523- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4524 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4525 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004526
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004527- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4528 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4529 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004530 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4531 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4532
4533- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4534 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004535
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004536Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004537-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004538
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004539- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4540 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4541
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004542- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4543 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4544 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4545 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4546
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004547- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4548 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4549 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4550 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4551
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004552 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4553 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4554 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4555 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4556 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4557 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4558 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4559 without losing information).
4560
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004561- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004562 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4563 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4564 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4565 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4566 module).
4567
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004568 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004569 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4570 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4571 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4572 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004573
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004574- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004575 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4576 encoding.
4577
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004578- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4579 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4580
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004581- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004582 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4583
4584- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4585 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4586 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4587 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4588
4589- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4590
4591- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4592 ON, and OFF.
4593
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004594- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4595 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4596
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004597Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004598-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004599
4600- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4601 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4602 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004603
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004604- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4605 been added: -X and -E.
4606
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004607Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004608-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004609
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004610- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4611 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4612
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004613C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004614-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004615
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004616- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4617 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4618 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4619 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4620 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4621
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004622- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4623 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4624 as long) arguments.
4625
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004626- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4627 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4628 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4629 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4630 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4631 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4632
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004633- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4634 input.
4635
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004636New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004637-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004638
4639Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004640-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004641
4642Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004643-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004644
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004645- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4646 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4647 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4648
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004649- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4650 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4651 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004652 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004653
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004654 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4655 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4656 import signal
4657 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004658
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004659 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004660 while 1:
4661 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004662 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004663 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4664 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4665 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4666 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004667
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004668
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004669What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4670===========================
4671
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004672*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4673
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004674Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004675--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004676
4677- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4678 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4679 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4680
4681- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4682 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4683 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4684 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4685 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4686 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4687 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004688
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004689- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004690 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004691 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4692 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4693 associate a docstring with a property.
4694
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004695- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4696 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4697 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4698 other built-in object types.
4699
4700- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4701 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4702 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4703 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4704 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4705
4706- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4707 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4708
4709- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4710 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004711 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004712 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4713 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4714 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4715 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4716 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4717
4718- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4719 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4720 class.
4721
4722- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4723 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4724 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4725 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4726
4727- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4728 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4729 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4730 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4731
4732- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4733 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4734
4735- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4736 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4737 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4738 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4739 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004740 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004741 with the same value as s.
4742
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004743- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4744
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004745Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004746----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004747
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004748- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4749
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004750- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4751 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4752 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4753 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4754 objects.
4755
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004756- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4757 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004758 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4759 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4760
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004761- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4762 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4763 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4764
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004765Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004766-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004767
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004768- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4769 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4770 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4771 by the instances.
4772
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004773- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4774 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4775 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4776
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004777- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4778 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4779 before the entire comparison is complete.
4780
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004781- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4782 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4783 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4784
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004785- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4786 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4787 getwriter().
4788
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004789- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4790 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4791
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004792- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004793 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4794 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4795
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004796- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4797 iterable object.
4798
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004799- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4800 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004801
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004802- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4803 authentication.
4804
4805- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4806 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004807
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004808- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004809 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4810 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4811 a sample driver.)
4812
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004813Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004814-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004815
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004816- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4817 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4818 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4819 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4820 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4821 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4822 kernel has large file support.
4823
4824- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4825 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4826 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4827 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4828 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4829
4830- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4831 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4832 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4833
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004834C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004835-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004836
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004837- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4838 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4839
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004840New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004841-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004842
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004843- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4844 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4845
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004846Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004847-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004848
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004849- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4850 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4851 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4852 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4853 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4854
4855- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4856 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4857 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4858 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4859
4860- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4861 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4862
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004863Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004864-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004865
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004866- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004867 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4868 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004869
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004870
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004871What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4872===========================
4873
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004874*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4875
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004876Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004877----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004878
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004879- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4880 big to represent as a C double.
4881
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004882- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4883 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4884 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4885 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4886 restriction).
4887
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004888- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4889 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4890 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4891 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4892 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4893
4894 >>> dir([])
4895 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4896 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4897 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4898 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4899 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4900 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4901 'reverse', 'sort']
4902
4903 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4904
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004905- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004906 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4907 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4908 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4909 OverflowError exception.
4910
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004911- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004912 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004913 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4914 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4915 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4916 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4917 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004918 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004919 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4920 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4921
4922 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4923 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4924 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4925 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004926
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004927- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004928 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4929 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4930 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4931 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4932 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4933 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4934 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4935 once it is created.
4936
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004937- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4938 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4939 (key, value) pairs.
4940
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004941- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004942 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4943 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4944
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004945- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4946 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4947 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4948 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4949 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004950
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004951- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004952 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4953 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4954
4955 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4956
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004957- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004958 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4959
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004960Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004961-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004962
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004963- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004964 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4965 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004966
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004967- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4968 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4969 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4970 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4971 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4972 in this area anymore).
4973
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004974- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4975 threading.Timer.
4976
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004977- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4978 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4979
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004980- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004981 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4982
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004983- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004984 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4985 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4986 converted to Python longs.
4987
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004988- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004989 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4990
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004991- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4992 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4993 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4994
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004995Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004996-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004997
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004998- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4999 division operators as per PEP 238.
5000
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005001Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005002-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005003
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005004- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5005 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5006 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5007 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5008
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005009C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005010-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005011
5012- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005013
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005014- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5015 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005016 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005017
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005018 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5019 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005020 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005021 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005022
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005023- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005024 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5025 module:
5026
5027 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005028
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005029 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5030 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005031
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005032 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5033 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005034
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005035 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5036
5037 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5038
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005039- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005040 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5041 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5042 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005043
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005044New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005045-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005046
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005047- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5048 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5049 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5050 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5051 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005052
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005053Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005054-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005055
5056Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005057-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005058
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005059- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5060 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5061 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5062 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005063 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5064 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5065 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5066 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5067 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005068
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005069- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005070 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5071
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005072
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005073What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5074===========================
5075
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005076*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5077
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005078Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005079-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005080
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005081- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5082 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5083
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005084- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5085 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5086 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005087
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005088- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5089 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5090 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5091 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005092
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005093- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5094
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005095- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005096
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005097Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005098-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005099
5100- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005101 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005102 the module docstring for details.
5103
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005104Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005105-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005106
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005107- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005108 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5109 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5110 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005111
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005112- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5113 Nick Mathewson.
5114
5115Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005116----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005117
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005118- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5119 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5120 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5121 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5122 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5123 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5124 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5125 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5126
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005127- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5128 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5129 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5130 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5131
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005132- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5133 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5134 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5135 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5136 come a long way).
5137
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005138- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5139 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5140 write filters for these warnings).
5141
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005142- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5143 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5144 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5145 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5146 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5147
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005148- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5149 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5150 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5151 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5152 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5153 older distribution.
5154
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005155Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005156-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005157
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005158- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5159 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005160 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005161
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005162- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5163 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5164 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5165
5166- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5167
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005168- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5169
5170- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5171
5172- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5173
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005174- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005175
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005176- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5177
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005178New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005179-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005180
5181C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005182-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005183
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005184- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5185 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5186 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5187 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5188 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5189 against buffer overruns.
5190
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005191- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005192 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5193 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005194 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5195 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5196 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5197
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005198- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5199 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5200 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5201 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5202 deprecated.
5203
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005204Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005205-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005206
5207- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5208 relevant is found.
5209
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005210
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005211What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005212===========================
5213
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005214*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5215
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005216Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005217----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005218
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005219- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5220 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5221 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5222 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5223 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5224 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5225 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5226 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005227 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005228 repaired.
5229
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005230- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005231 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005232 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5233 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5234 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5235 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5236 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5237 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5238 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5239 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5240
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005241- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5242 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5243 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5244 leading BMO character).
5245
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005246- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5247 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5248 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5249
5250 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5251 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5252 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005253
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005254 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5255 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5256 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5257 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5258 for various simple to use conversions.
5259
5260 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5261 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5262
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005263 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5264 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5265 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5266 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5267 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5268 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5269 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5270 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5271 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5272 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5273 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5274 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5275 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5276 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5277 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005278
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005279- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5280 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5281 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005282 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005283 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005284
5285 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005286 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5287 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5288 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5289 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5290 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005291 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5292 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005293
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005294 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5295 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5296 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005297 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005298
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005299- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5300 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5301 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5302 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5303 floating arithmetic,
5304
5305 x = 9007199254740992.0
5306 print long(x)
5307
5308 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5309 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5310 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5311 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5312 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5313 functions are of good quality).
5314
5315 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5316 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5317 algorithms to break.
5318
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005319- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5320 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5321 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5322 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5323 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5324 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5325 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5326 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5327 order.
5328
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005329- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5330 operation along the most common code paths.
5331
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005332- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5333 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5334
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005335- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5336 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5337 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5338 {}.update(UserDict())
5339
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005340- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5341 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5342 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5343 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5344 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5345 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5346 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5347 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5348
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005349- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005350 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005351
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005352 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005353 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5354 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005355 join() method of strings
5356 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005357 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5358 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005359 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005360 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005361
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005362- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5363 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5364
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005365- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5366 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5367
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005368- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5369 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5370 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5371 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5372
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005373- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5374 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005375 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005376 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5377 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005378
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005379- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5380
5381
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005382Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005383-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005384
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005385- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005386 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005387 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5388 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5389
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005390- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5391 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5392
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005393- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5394 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5395 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5396 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5397
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005398- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5399 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5400 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5401
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005402- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5403
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005404- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5405
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005406- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5407 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5408 that are still imported into string.py).
5409
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005410- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5411
5412- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5413 Now it does.
5414
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005415- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5416
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005417- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5418 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5419 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5420 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5421 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005422 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5423 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005424
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005425- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5426 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5427 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5428 'help(object)'.
5429
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005430Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005431-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005432
5433- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005434 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005435 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5436 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5437
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005438- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005439 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5440 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005441
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005442C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005443-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005444
5445- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5446 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005447
5448----
5449
5450**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**