blob: eb40d97b30ce48577ce7d425752f07208c660bf9 [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 Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000019
20Extension Modules
21-----------------
22
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000023- array.array objects are now picklable.
24
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000025- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
26 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
27
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000028- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
29 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
30 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
31
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000032
33Library
34-------
35
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +000036- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
37 (Bug #951915).
38
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +000039- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
40 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
41 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
42 encoding alias table
43
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +000044- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
45
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000046- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
47 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
48
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +000049- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
50
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +000051- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
52
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +000053- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
54
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +000055- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
56
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +000057- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
58
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +000059- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
60 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
61 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
62
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000063- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000064 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000065
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +000066- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
67 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
68 tokenizer with very long source lines.
69
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +000070- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
71 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
72
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000073
74Build
75-----
76
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +000077- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
78 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
79 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
80 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
81 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
82 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
83 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
84 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
85
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000086
87C API
88-----
89
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +000090- Removed PyRange_New().
91
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000092
93Tests
94-----
95
96
97Mac
98---
99
100
101
102Tools/Demos
103-----------
104
105
106
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000107What's New in Python 2.4 final?
108===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000109
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000110*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000111
112Core and builtins
113-----------------
114
115- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
116 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
117 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
118
119
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000120What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
121==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000122
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000123*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000124
125Core and builtins
126-----------------
127
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000128- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
129 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
130 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
131
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000132
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000133Library
134-------
135
136- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
137 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
138 raised is re-raised.
139
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000140- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
141 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
142
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000143- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
144 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
145 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
146 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
147 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
148 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
149 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
150 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
151 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
152 by the slice are recomputed now.
153
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000154- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000155
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000156Build
157-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000158
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000159- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
160 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
161 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000162
163C API
164-----
165
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000166- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
167
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000168
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000169What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
170================================
171
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000172*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000173
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000174License
175-------
176
177The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
178is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
179changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
180Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
181intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
182durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
183the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
184License::
185
186 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
187
188says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
189to Python 2.1.1.
190
191The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
192License Version 2.
193
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000194Core and builtins
195-----------------
196
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000197- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
198 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
199 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
200 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
201 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
202 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
203 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
204 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
205 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
206 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
207
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000208- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000209
210Extension Modules
211-----------------
212
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000213- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
214 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
215 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
216 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000217
218Library
219-------
220
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000221- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
222 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
223 returned.
224
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000225- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
226
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000227- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
228 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
229
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000230- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
231
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000232- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
233 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000234
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000235- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
236
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000237- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
238
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000239- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000240 the source code is updated and reloaded.
241
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000242Build
243-----
244
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000245- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000246
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000247What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
248================================
249
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000250*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000251
252Core and builtins
253-----------------
254
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000255- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000256 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
257
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000258- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
259 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
260 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
261 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
262
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000263- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
264 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
265
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000266- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
267 constant.
268
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000269- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
270 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
271 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
272 large), and to anomalies such as
273 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
274 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
275 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
276 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000277
278Extension modules
279-----------------
280
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000281- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
282 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000283 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
284 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
285 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000286
287Library
288-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000289
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000290- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000291 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000292 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
293 --swig-cpp.
294
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000295- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
296 it is set.
297
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000298- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000299
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000300- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
301 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
302 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
303 Closes bug #1039270.
304
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000305- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000306
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000307 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000308 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
309 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
310 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
311 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
312 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
313 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
314 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
315 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
316 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
317 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
318 + Updates to documentation.
319
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000320- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
321 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
322 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
323 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
324
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000325- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000326
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000327- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
328 applications should use the getmember function.
329
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000330- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
331
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000332- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
333 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
334 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
335 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
336 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
337 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
338 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
339 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
340 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
341
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000342- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
343 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000344 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000345
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000346- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
347 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
348 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
349 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
350 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
351 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
352 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
353 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000354
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000355- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
356 the new public features (of which there are many).
357
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000358- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000359 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
360 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
361 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
362 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000363 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000364
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000365- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
366
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000367- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
368 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
369 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
370 options.
371
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000372- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
373 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
374 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
375 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
376 conditions under which non-string values work.
377
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000378Build
379-----
380
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000381- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
382 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
383 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
384
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000385- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
386 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
387 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
388 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
389 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000390
391C API
392-----
393
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000394- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
395 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
396
397- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
398
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000399- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
400 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
401 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
402 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
403 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
404 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
405 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
406 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
407 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
408
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000409- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
410
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000411- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
412 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
413 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000414
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000415Tests
416-----
417
418- test__locale ported to unittest
419
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000420Mac
421---
422
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000423- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
424 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
425 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000426
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000427Tools/Demos
428-----------
429
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000430- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
431 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
432 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
433 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
434 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000435
436
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000437What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
438=================================
439
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000440*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000441
442Core and builtins
443-----------------
444
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000445- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000446 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
447
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000448- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
449 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
450 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
451 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
452 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
453 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
454 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
455 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000456 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
457 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
458 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
459 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
460 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000461
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000462- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
463 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
464 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
465 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
466 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
467
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000468- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
469
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000470- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
471 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
472
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000473- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
474 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
475 modified the list.
476
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000477- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
478 functions is now writable.
479
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000480- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
481 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
482 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
483 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
484
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000485- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
486 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
487 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
488 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
489 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000490
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000491- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
492 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
493
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000494Extension modules
495-----------------
496
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000497- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
498
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000499- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
500 data.
501
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000502- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
503 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
504 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
505 supposed to have been truncated away.
506
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000507- Added socket.socketpair().
508
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000509- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
510 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
511
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000512- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000513 versions of Python, have now been removed.
514
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000515Library
516-------
517
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000518- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000519 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000520
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000521- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
522 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
523
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000524- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
525 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
526
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000527- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
528
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000529- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
530 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000531
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000532- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
533 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
534
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000535- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
536
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000537- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
538
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000539- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
540
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000541- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
542 Percivall.
543
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000544- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
545 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
546
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000547- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
548 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
549 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000550 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000551
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000552- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
553 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
554 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
555 and exponent.
556
557- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
558
559- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
560 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
561 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
562
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000563- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
564 to the readline module.
565
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000566- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000567 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
568 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000569
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000570- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
571 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
572 contains symlinks.
573
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000574- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
575 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
576
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000577- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
578 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
579 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
580
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000581- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
582 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
583 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
584 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
585 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
586 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
587 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
588 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
589 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
590 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
591 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
592 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
593 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
594
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000595- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
596
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000597Tools/Demos
598-----------
599
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000600- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
601 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
602
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000603- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
604
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000605Build
606-----
607
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000608- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
609 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
610 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
611 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
612 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
613 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
614 plans to do so.
615
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000616- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
617 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
618
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000619- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
620 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
621
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000622- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
623 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
624
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000625- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
626 GNU/k*BSD systems.
627
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000628- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
629 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
630
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000631C API
632-----
633
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000634..
635
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000636Documentation
637-------------
638
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000639- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
640 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
641
642- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
643 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
644 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000645
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000646New platforms
647-------------
648
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000649- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
650
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000651Tests
652-----
653
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000654..
655
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000656Windows
657-------
658
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000659- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
660 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
661 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
662 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
663 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
664 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
665 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
666 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
667 the problem.
668
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000669Mac
670---
671
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000672..
673
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000674
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000675What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
676=================================
677
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000678*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000679
680Core and builtins
681-----------------
682
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000683- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
684 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
685 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
686 sensitive code.
687
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000688- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000689 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000690
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000691 @staticmethod
692 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000693
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000694 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000695
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000696- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
697 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
698 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
699 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
700 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
701 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
702 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
703 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
704 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
705 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
706 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
707
708 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
709 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
710 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
711 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
712 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
713 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
714 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
715
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000716- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
717 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
718
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000719- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000720 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000721
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000722- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000723 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000724 which was missing for no apparent reason.
725
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000726- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000727 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
728 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
729
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000730- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
731 types that support garbage collection.
732
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000733- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
734
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000735- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
736 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
737 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
738 Jython.
739
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000740- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
741
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000742- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
743 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
744
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000745- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
746 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
747 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000748
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000749- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
750 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
751 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
752
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000753Extension modules
754-----------------
755
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000756- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
757
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000758Library
759-------
760
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000761- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
762 TIS-620
763
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000764- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
765 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
766 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
767 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
768 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
769 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
770 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
771 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
772 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
773 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
774
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000775- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
776
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000777- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
778 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
779 same as when the argument is omitted).
780 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
781
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000782- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
783
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000784- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
785 schemes are offered.
786
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000787- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
788
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000789- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
790 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
791 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
792
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000793- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
794
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000795- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
796 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
797
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000798- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
799 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
800 when dummy_threading is being used.
801
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000802- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
803 from a tarfile.
804
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000805- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000806 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000807
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000808- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
809 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
810 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
811 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
812
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000813- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
814 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
815
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000816- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
817 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
818 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
819 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
820 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
821 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
822 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
823 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
824 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
825 by some other method in progress).
826
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000827- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
828 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
829 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000830
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000831- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
832
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000833- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
834 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
835 AM Kuchling.
836
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000837- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
838 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
839 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
840
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000841- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
842 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
843 instead of unsigned.
844
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000845- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000846 no longer part of the public API.
847
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000848- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
849 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
850 string methods of the same name).
851
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000852- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000853 SF patch 945642.
854
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000855- doctest unittest integration improvements:
856
857 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
858
859 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
860 DocTestSuites.
861
862- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
863 that provide thread-local data.
864
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000865- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
866 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
867
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000868- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
869
870- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
871 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
872 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
873
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000874- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
875
876 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
877 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
878 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000879
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000880 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
881 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
882 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
883 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
884
885 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
886 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
887
888 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
889 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
890 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
891 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
892
893 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
894 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
895 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
896 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
897 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
898
899 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
900 wrapping help output.
901
902 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
903 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
904 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000905
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000906C API
907-----
908
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000909- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
910 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
911 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
912 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
913 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
914 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
915 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
916 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
917 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
918 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
919 its visible semantics have not changed.
920
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000921- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
922 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
923
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000924Documentation
925-------------
926
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000927- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000928
929 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000930 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000931
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000932 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000933
934 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
935
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000936- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000937
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000938Tests
939-----
940
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000941- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000942 platforms that use the Makefile.
943
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000944- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
945 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
946 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
947
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000948
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000949What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
950=================================
951
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000952*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000953
954Core and builtins
955-----------------
956
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000957- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
958 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
959 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
960 objects now (one object instead of three).
961
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000962- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
963 Windows DLLs.
964
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000965- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
966 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000967
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000968- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
969 a new .pyc magic.
970
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000971- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
972 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
973 be there.
974
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000975- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
976 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
977 the LC_NUMERIC category.
978
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000979- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
980 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
981 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
982
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000983- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
984
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000985- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
986 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
987 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000988
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000989- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
990 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
991
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000992- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
993
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000994- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000995 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000996
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000997- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
998
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000999- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1000
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001001- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1002 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1003
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001004- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1005 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1006 Fixes bug #858016 .
1007
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001008- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1009 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1010 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1011
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001012- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1013 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1014 improves their performance (about 35%).
1015
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001016- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1017 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1018 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1019
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001020- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1021 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1022 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1023 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1024
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001025- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1026 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1027 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1028 length is not known).
1029
1030- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1031 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001032 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1033 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001034 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1035
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001036- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1037 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1038
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001039- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1040 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1041 keyword arguments.
1042
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001043- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1044 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1045 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1046
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001047- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1048 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1049 cases.
1050
1051- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1052 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1053 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1054 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1055 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1056 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1057 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1058 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1059 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1060 a release build.
1061
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001062- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1063 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1064
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001065- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001066 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001067
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001068- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1069 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1070 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1071 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1072 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1073 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1074 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1075 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1076 destroyed.
1077
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001078- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1079 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1080 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1081 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1082 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1083 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1084 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1085 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1086
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001087- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1088 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1089 character other than a space.
1090
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001091- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1092 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1093 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1094 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1095 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1096 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1097 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1098 attributes with the same name.
1099
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001100- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1101 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1102 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1103 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1104 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1105 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1106 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1107 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1108 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1109 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1110 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1111 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1112 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1113 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001114
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001115- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1116 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1117 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1118 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1119 This has been repaired.
1120
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001121- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1122
1123- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1124
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001125- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1126 over a sequence.
1127
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001128- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001129 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001130
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001131- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1132
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001133- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1134 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1135 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1136 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1137 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1138 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1139 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1140 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1141
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001142- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1143 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1144 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1145
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001146- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1147 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1148 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1149 freelist.
1150
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001151- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1152 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1153
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001154- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1155 number.
1156
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001157- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1158 a TypeError exception.
1159
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001160- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1161 820195.
1162
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001163- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1164 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1165 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1166
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001167- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001168 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1169 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001170
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001171- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1172 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1173 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1174
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001175- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1176 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001177 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001178
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001179- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001180 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1181 the first call.
1182
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001183
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001184Extension modules
1185-----------------
1186
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001187- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1188 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1189
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001190- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1191 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1192 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1193 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1194 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1195 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1196 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001197
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001198- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1199
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001200- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1201
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001202- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1203 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1204
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001205- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1206 fewer false positives.
1207
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001208- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1209 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1210
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001211- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001212 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1213
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001214- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001215 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001216 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001217 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1218 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001219
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001220- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1221 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1222 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1223 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1224
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001225- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1226 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1227 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1228 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1229 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1230 #897625.
1231
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001232- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1233 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1234
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001235- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1236 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1237 and pops on either side of the deque.
1238
1239- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1240 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1241
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001242- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1243 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1244 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1245 other functions that expect a function argument.
1246
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001247- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1248
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001249- os.getsid was added.
1250
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001251- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1252 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1253 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1254
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001255- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1256
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001257- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1258
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001259- readline.clear_history was added.
1260
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001261- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1262
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001263- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1264
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001265- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1266
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001267- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1268
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001269- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1270
1271- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1272
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001273- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1274
1275- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1276
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001277- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1278 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1279 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1280
1281- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1282 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1283 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1284 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1285 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1286 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1287 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1288
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001289- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1290 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1291 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1292 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001293
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001294- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001295 iterators from a single iterable.
1296
1297- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1298 of raising a TypeError exception.
1299
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001300- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1301 as parameter.
1302
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001303Library
1304-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001305
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001306- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1307 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1308 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001309
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001310- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1311 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1312 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001313
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001314- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001315
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001316- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1317 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001318
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001319- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1320 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1321
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001322- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1323
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001324- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001325 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001326
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001327- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001328 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001329
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001330- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1331
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001332- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1333 on cygwin and mingw32.
1334
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001335- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1336
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001337- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1338 module.
1339
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001340- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1341 installation scheme for all platforms.
1342
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001343- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001344 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001345
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001346- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1347 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1348 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1349
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001350- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1351 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1352 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1353
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001354- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1355
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001356- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1357
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001358- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1359 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1360
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001361- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1362 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1363 type pattern with the same value exists.
1364
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001365- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1366 when run from the command prompt).
1367
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001368- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1369 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1370
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001371- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1372 default sort).
1373
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001374- Added global runctx function to profile module
1375
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001376- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1377
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001378- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1379
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001380- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1381
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001382- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001383 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1384 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1385 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1386 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1387 accordingly.
1388
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001389- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1390 decoding standards.
1391
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001392- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1393 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1394 called for all requests.
1395
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001396- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1397 they are passed to the compiler.
1398
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001399- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1400 indent, width and depth.
1401
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001402- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1403 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1404
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001405- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1406 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1407
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001408- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1409
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001410- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1411
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001412- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1413
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001414- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1415 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1416
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001417- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001418 for better performance.
1419
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001420- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001421
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001422- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1423 a string).
1424
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001425- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1426
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001427- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1428
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001429- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1430
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001431- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1432
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001433- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1434 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1435 list of fieldnames.
1436
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001437- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1438 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1439
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001440- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1441
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001442- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1443 empty lists.
1444
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001445- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1446 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1447 and shelves.
1448
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001449- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1450 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1451
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001452- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001453 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1454 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001455
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001456- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1457 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001458 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001459
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001460- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001461 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1462 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1463
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001464- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1465 and removed in Py2.4.
1466
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001467- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1468
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001469- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1470
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001471Tools/Demos
1472-----------
1473
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001474- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1475 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1476
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001477- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1478
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001479- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1480 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1481 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1482 destination in situations where both files are given.
1483
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001484- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1485 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1486 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1487 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1488
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001489- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1490
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001491- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1492 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1493 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1494 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1495 now.
1496
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001497- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1498 in effect
1499
1500- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1501 C-c C-h
1502
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001503- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1504 -d option was given.
1505
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001506Build
1507-----
1508
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001509- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1510 build under OS X.
1511
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001512- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1513 --enable-profiling.
1514
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001515- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1516 is configured --with-tsc.
1517
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001518- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1519 on AMD64.
1520
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001521- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1522 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1523
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001524- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1525 removed.
1526
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001527- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1528 supported (see PEP 11).
1529
1530- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1531
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001532- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1533
1534- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1535 (see PEP 11).
1536
1537- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1538 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1539
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001540C API
1541-----
1542
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001543- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1544 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1545 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1546
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001547- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1548 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1549 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1550 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1551
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001552- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1553 generator objects.
1554
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001555- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1556 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001557 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1558 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001559
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001560- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1561 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1562
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001563- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1564 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1565 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1566 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1567 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1568
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001569- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1570 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1571 about 10% faster.
1572
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001573- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1574 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1575
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001576- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1577 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1578 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1579 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1580
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001581Windows
1582-------
1583
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001584- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1585 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1586 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1587 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1588
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001589- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1590 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1591 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1592
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001593
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001594What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1595===============================
1596
1597*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1598
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001599IDLE
1600----
1601
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001602- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1603 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1604 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1605 context-menu actions.
1606
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001607- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1608 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1609 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1610 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1611 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1612 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1613 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1614 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1615 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1616
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001617
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001618What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1619=============================================
1620
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001621*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001622
1623Core and builtins
1624-----------------
1625
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001626- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001627 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001628 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1629
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001630Extension modules
1631-----------------
1632
1633- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1634 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1635 than once. This has been fixed.
1636
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001637- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1638 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1639 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1640 call.
1641
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001642- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1643
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001644Library
1645-------
1646
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001647- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1648 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1649
1650- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1651 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1652 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1653 restored.
1654
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001655IDLE
1656----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001657
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001658- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001659
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001660Build
1661-----
1662
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001663- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1664 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1665
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001666C API
1667-----
1668
1669Windows
1670-------
1671
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001672- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1673 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1674
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001675- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1676
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001677Mac
1678---
1679
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001680- Various fixes to pimp.
1681
1682- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1683
1684- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1685 more problems than it solves.
1686
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001687
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001688What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1689=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001690
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001691*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1692
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001693Core and builtins
1694-----------------
1695
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001696- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1697 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1698
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001699- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1700 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001701 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001702
1703- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1704 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1705 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001706 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001707
1708- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1709 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001710
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001711- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1712 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1713 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1714
1715- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001716 770247.
1717
1718- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001719
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001720Extension modules
1721-----------------
1722
1723- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1724 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1725
1726- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1727
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001728- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1729
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001730- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1731 contained within the _strptime module.
1732
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001733- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1734 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1735
1736- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001737 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1738
1739- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1740 the find_class attribute, if present.
1741
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001742- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001743
1744 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1745 (SF bug 763298).
1746
1747 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001748 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1749 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1750 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001751
1752 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1753
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001754Library
1755-------
1756
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001757- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1758
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001759- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1760 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1761 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1762 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1763 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1764 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1765 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1766 or Tester().
1767
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001768- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1769 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1770 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1771 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1772 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1773 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1774 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1775 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1776 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001777
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001778 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001779
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001780- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1781 weren't before was an oversight.
1782
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001783- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1784 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1785
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001786- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1787 when there are no lines.
1788
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001789- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1790 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1791
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001792- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1793 to child processes.
1794
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001795- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1796
1797- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1798
1799- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1800 xmlrpclib.
1801
1802- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1803 responses.
1804
1805- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1806 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1807
1808- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1809 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1810 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1811
1812- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1813 used as patterns.
1814
1815- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1816 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1817 than Tk 8.3.
1818
1819- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1820
1821- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001822
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001823Tools/Demos
1824-----------
1825
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001826- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1827
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001828- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1829
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001830- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001831
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001832Build
1833-----
1834
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001835- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1836
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001837- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1838
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001839- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1840 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001841
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001842- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1843 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1844 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001845
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001846C API
1847-----
1848
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001849- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1850 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1851
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001852Windows
1853-------
1854
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001855- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1856 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1857 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1858 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1859 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1860 Python exception ::
1861
1862 thread.error: can't start new thread
1863
1864 is raised now.
1865
1866- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1867 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1868 instead of from DLL teardown.
1869
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001870Mac
1871---
1872
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001873- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001874 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001875 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1876 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1877 the executable in the bundle.
1878
1879- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001880
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001881- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1882
1883- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1884 on Panther.
1885
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001886What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1887================================
1888
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001889*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001890
1891Core and builtins
1892-----------------
1893
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001894- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1895 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1896 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1897 with the -i option.
1898
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001899- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1900 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1901
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001902- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1903 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1904
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001905- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1906 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1907 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1908 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1909 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1910 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1911 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1912 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1913 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1914 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1915 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1916 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1917 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001918
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001919- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1920 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1921 embedded in a lambda expression.
1922
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001923- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1924 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1925 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1926 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1927 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1928
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001929- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1930 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1931 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1932
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001933- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1934 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1935
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001936- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1937 It's writable again.
1938
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001939- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1940 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1941 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001942 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001943
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001944- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1945 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1946 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1947
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001948Extension modules
1949-----------------
1950
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001951- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1952 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1953
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001954- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1955 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1956 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1957 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1958
1959- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1960 collection.
1961
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001962- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1963 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1964 unique within a single program run.
1965
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001966- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1967 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1968
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001969- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1970 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1971
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001972- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1973 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001974
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001975- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1976
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001977- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1978 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1979
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001980- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1981 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1982 for many BSD-derived systems.
1983
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001984
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001985Library
1986-------
1987
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001988- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1989 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1990 primary ones:
1991
1992 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1993 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1994 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1995
1996 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1997 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1998 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1999 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2000 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2001 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2002
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002003- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2004 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2005 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2006 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2007 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2008 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2009 argument.
2010
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002011- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2012 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2013 in the archive.
2014
2015- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2016 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2017
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002018- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2019 569574).
2020
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002021- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2022 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2023 no more.
2024
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002025- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2026 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2027 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2028 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2029 code coverage.
2030
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002031- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2032 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2033 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002034 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2035 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002036
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002037- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2038 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2039 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002040 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002041
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002042- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2043
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002044- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2045 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2046 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2047 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2048
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002049- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2050 handling.
2051
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002052- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2053 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2054
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002055- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2056 in socket.py.
2057
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002058- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2059
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002060- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2061 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2062 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2063 opener with proxy support.
2064
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002065- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2066
2067- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2068
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002069Tools/Demos
2070-----------
2071
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002072- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2073
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002074- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2075
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002076- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2077 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002078
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002079- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2080 files.
2081
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002082Build
2083-----
2084
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002085- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002086 different root directory.
2087
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002088C API
2089-----
2090
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002091- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2092 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2093 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2094 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2095 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2096 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2097 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2098 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2099 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2100 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2101
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002102- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2103 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2104 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2105 from Python.
2106
2107
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002108New platforms
2109-------------
2110
2111None this time.
2112
2113Tests
2114-----
2115
2116- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2117 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2118
2119Windows
2120-------
2121
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002122- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2123
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002124- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2125 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2126 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2127 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2128 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2129 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2130 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2131 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2132 that's what it's for.
2133
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002134Mac
2135---
2136
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002137- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2138 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2139 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2140 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002141- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2142 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2143- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002144
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002145SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2146------------------------------------
2147
2148430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2149598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2150622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2151661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2152683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2153697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2154713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2155724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2156727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2157729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2158730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2159731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2160732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2161733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2162735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2163740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2164744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2165745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2166747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2167749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2168751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2169753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2170755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2171757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2172760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2173
2174
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002175What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2176================================
2177
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002178*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002179
2180Core and builtins
2181-----------------
2182
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002183- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2184 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2185
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002186- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2187 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2188 and cannot be strings).
2189
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002190- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2191 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2192 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2193 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2194
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002195- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2196 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2197 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2198 Python itself.
2199
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002200- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2201 the referenced object, if it has one.
2202
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002203- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2204 the thread started at
2205 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2206
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002207- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2208 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2209 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2210 placed on a list index.
2211
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002212- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2213 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2214 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2215 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2216
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002217- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2218 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2219 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2220 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2221 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2222 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2223 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2224
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002225- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2226 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2227 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2228 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2229 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2230
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002231- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2232 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002233
2234- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2235 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2236 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2237 #693195.)
2238
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002239- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2240 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002241
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002242- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002243 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002244 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2245 interpreter executions, would fail.
2246
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002247- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002248 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002249 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002250
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002251Extension modules
2252-----------------
2253
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002254- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2255 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2256 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2257 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2258
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002259- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2260 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2261
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002262- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2263 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2264 and Greg Chapman.)
2265
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002266- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2267 recursively.
2268
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002269- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002270 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2271 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2272 leaks.
2273
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002274- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2275
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002276- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2277 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2278 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2279 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2280 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2281 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2282 #705836.
2283
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002284- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002285 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2286
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002287- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2288 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2289 See SF bug #692416.
2290
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002291- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2292 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2293
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002294- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2295 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2296 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002297
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002298- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002299 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2300 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2301
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002302- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2303 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2304 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2305 timeouts to work properly.
2306
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002307Library
2308-------
2309
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002310- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2311 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2312 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2313 future release.
2314
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002315- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2316 for querying platform dependent features.
2317
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002318- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002319
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002320- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2321 pickle protocol versions.
2322
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002323- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2324 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2325 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2326
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002327- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2328
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002329- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2330 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2331 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2332 modules.
2333
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002334- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2335 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2336 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2337
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002338- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2339 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2340
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002341- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2342 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2343 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2344
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002345- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002346 MS Office extensions.
2347
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002348- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2349 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2350
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002351- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2352 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2353
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002354- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2355 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2356 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2357 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2358 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2359 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2360
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002361- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2362 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2363 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002364
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002365- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2366 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2367 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2368
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002369- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2370
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002371- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2372 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2373 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2374
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002375Tools/Demos
2376-----------
2377
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002378- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2379 See the module docstring for details.
2380
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002381Build
2382-----
2383
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002384- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2385 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002386
2387C API
2388-----
2389
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002390- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2391
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002392- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2393 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2394 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2395
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002396- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2397 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002398
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002399 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2400 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2401 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002402
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002403- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002404 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2405
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002406- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2407 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2408 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002409
2410New platforms
2411-------------
2412
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002413None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002414
2415Tests
2416-----
2417
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002418- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2419 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002420
2421Windows
2422-------
2423
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002424- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2425 function.
2426
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002427- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2428 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002429
2430Mac
2431---
2432
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002433- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2434 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002435
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002436- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2437 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002438
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002439- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2440 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2441 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002442
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002443- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002444 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2445 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002446
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002447- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2448 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002449
2450
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002451What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2452=================================
2453
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002454*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002455
2456Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002457-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002458
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002459- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2460 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2461 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2462
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002463- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2464 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2465 (SF patch #664376.)
2466
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002467- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2468 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2469 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2470 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2471 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2472 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002473 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002474
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002475- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2476 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2477 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2478 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002479 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002480
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002481- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2482 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2483 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2484 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2485 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2486 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2487 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2488 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2489 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2490 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2491 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2492
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002493- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2494 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2495 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2496 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2497 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2498 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2499
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002500- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2501 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2502
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002503- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2504 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2505 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2506 case.)
2507
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002508- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2509 passed as unicode strings.
2510
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002511- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2512 See SF bug #683467.
2513
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002514- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2515 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2516
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002517- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2518
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002519- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2520
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002521- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2522 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2523 arguments.
2524
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002525- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2526 See SF bug #667147.
2527
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002528- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002529 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002530 See SF bug #676155.
2531
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002532- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002533 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002534 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2535 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2536 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2537 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2538 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2539 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002540
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002541Extension modules
2542-----------------
2543
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002544- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2545 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2546 tp_as_number pointer.
2547
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002548- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2549 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2550 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2551 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2552 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2553
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002554- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2555
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002556- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2557
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002558- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002559 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002560 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2561 patch #678531.)
2562
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002563- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2564 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2565
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002566- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2567 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2568
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002569- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2570
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002571- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2572 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2573 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2574
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002575- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2576
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002577- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2578 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2579
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002580- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002581
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002582- datetime changes:
2583
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002584 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2585
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002586 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2587 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2588 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2589 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2590 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2591 now.
2592
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002593 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002594 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2595 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002596
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002597 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002598 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002599 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2600 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2601 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2602 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002603
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002604 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2605 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2606 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002607 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2608
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002609 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2610 by a later example coded by Guido.
2611
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002612 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002613 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2614 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2615 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002616 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2617 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2618
2619 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2620 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2621 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2622 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2623 tzinfo subclass instance.
2624
2625 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2626 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2627 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2628 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2629 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2630 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2631 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2632 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002633
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002634 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2635 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2636 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2637 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2638 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002639 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2640
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002641 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002642
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002643 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2644 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2645 as a naive datetime object.
2646
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002647 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2648 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2649 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2650
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002651 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2652 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2653 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2654 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2655 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2656 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2657 comparison.
2658
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002659 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2660 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2661 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2662 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002663 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002664
2665 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002666
2667 and ::
2668
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002669 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2670
2671 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2672 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2673 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2674 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2675
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002676 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2677 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2678 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2679 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2680 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2681
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002682 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2683 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002684 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2685 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002686
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002687Library
2688-------
2689
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002690- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2691 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2692
2693- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2694 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2695 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2696 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2697 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2698 See PEP 307 for details.
2699
2700- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2701 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2702
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002703- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2704 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002705 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002706 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2707 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002708 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002709
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002710- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2711 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2712
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002713- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2714 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2715 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2716
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002717- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2718
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002719- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2720 exception.
2721
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002722- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2723 class.
2724
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002725- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2726 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2727 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2728
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002729- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2730 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2731
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002732- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002733 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2734 See SF bug #659228.
2735
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002736- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2737 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2738 See SF patch #651082.
2739
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002740- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002741
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002742- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2743 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2744
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002745- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002746 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002747
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002748- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2749 DOS paths from other platforms.
2750
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002751Tools/Demos
2752-----------
2753
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002754- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2755 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2756 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2757 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2758 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2759 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2760 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2761 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2762 example:
2763
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002764 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2765 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002766
2767 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2768
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002769
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002770Build
2771-----
2772
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002773- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2774 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2775 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002776 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2777
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002778 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2779
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002780- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2781 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2782 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2783 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2784 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2785 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2786 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2787 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2788 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2789
2790- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2791 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2792 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2793 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2794
2795- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2796 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2797
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002798C API
2799-----
2800
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002801- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2802 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002803
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002804- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2805 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2806 tp_as_number pointer.
2807
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002808- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2809 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2810 (SF #681367)
2811
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002812- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2813 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2814 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2815 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002816
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002817Tests
2818-----
2819
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002820- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002821 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2822 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2823 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2824 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2825 pydoc.)
2826
2827- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2828
2829- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002830
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002831Windows
2832-------
2833
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002834- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2835 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2836 time).
2837
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002838- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2839 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2840
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002841- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2842 release without strong cryptography.
2843
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002844- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002845 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002846
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002847- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2848 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2849
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002850Mac
2851---
2852
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002853- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2854 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002855
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002856- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2857 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2858 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002859
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002860- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2861 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002862
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002863- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2864 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2865 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2866 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002867
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002868- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002869 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2870 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2871 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002872
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002873
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002874What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002875=================================
2876
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002877*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002878
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002879Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002880--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002881
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002882- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2883
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002884- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2885 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002886 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002887 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002888 a different meaning than before.
2889
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002890- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002891 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002892 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002893
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002894- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002895 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002896 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002897
2898- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2899 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2900 and deallocation.
2901
2902- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2903 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2904
2905- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2906 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2907 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2908 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2909 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2910
2911- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2912 now detected by the garbage collector.
2913
2914- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2915 [SF bug 519621]
2916
2917- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2918 identifier.
2919
2920- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2921 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2922 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2923 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2924 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2925 [SF bug 563060]
2926
2927- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2928 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2929 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2930 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2931 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2932
2933- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2934 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2935 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2936
2937- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2938
2939- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2940 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2941 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2942 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2943 state of the slots would be lost.)
2944
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002945Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002946-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002947
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002948- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002949 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2950 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2951 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2952 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002953 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2954 Jython 2.1.
2955
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002956- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002957 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002958 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2959 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2960 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2961 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2962 these, see PEP 302.
2963
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002964- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2965 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2966 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2967
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002968- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2969 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2970 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2971
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002972- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2973 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2974 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2975
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002976- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2977 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2978 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2979 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2980 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2981 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2982 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2983 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2984 releases or implementations.
2985
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002986- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002987 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2988 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002989
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002990- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2991 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2992
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002993- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2994 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2995 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2996
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002997- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2998 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2999
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003000- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3001 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003002 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3003 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003004
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003005- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3006 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3007 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3008 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3009 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3010
3011 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3012 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3013 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3014 pattern.
3015
3016 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3017 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3018 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3019 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3020
3021 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3022 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3023 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3024 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3025 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3026 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3027
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003028- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3029 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3030 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3031 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3032 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3033 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3034 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3035 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003036
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003037- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3038 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3039 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3040 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3041 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003042 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3043 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3044 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3045 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3046 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3047 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3048 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003049
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003050- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3051 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3052
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003053- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3054 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3055 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3056 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3057 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3058 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3059 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3060 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3061 to Zack Weinberg!
3062
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003063- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3064 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3065 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3066 type. This has been fixed now.
3067
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003068- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3069 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3070 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3071
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003072- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3073 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3074 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3075 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3076 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3077 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3078 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3079 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003080 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003081
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003082- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3083 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3084 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003085
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003086- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3087 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3088 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3089 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3090 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3091 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3092 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3093 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003094 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003095 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3096 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3097
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003098- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3099 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3100 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3101 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3102 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3103 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3104 this.)
3105
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003106- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3107 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003108 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003109 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003110 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3111 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003112 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3113 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003114
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003115- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3116 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3117 currently running.
3118
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003119- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3120 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3121 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3122 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3123
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003124- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3125 as directory names.
3126
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003127- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3128 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3129
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003130- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3131 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3132
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003133- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003134 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3135 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003136
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003137- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3138 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3139 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3140 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3141 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3142
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003143- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3144 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3145 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3146 removed.
3147
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003148- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3149 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3150 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3151
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003152- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3153 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3154 to __debug__.
3155
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003156- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3157 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3158 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3159
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003160- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3161 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3162 deprecated now.
3163
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003164- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3165 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3166 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003167
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003168- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3169 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3170 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3171 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3172 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003173
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003174- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3175 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3176
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003177- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3178 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3179 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003180 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003181 is backward compatible.
3182
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003183- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3184 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3185 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3186 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3187 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3188
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003189- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3190 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3191 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3192 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3193 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3194 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003195
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003196- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3197 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3198
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003199- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3200 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3201
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003202- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3203 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3204 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3205 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3206 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3207
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003208- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3209 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3210 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3211
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003212- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003213 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3214
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003215- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3216 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3217 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003218
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003219- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3220 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3221
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003222- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3223 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3224 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3225
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003226- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3227
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003228Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003229-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003230
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003231- Added three operators to the operator module:
3232 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3233 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3234 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3235
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003236- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3237
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003238- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3239 archives.
3240
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003241- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3242 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3243 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3244
3245 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3246
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003247- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3248 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3249 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003250 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003251
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003252- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3253 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3254 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3255 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003256 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3257 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3258 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3259 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003260
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003261- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3262 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003263
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003264- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3265
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003266- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3267 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3268
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003269- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3270 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3271 supported.
3272
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003273- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3274
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003275- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3276 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003277
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003278- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3279 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3280
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003281- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3282
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003283- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3284 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3285
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003286- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3287 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3288 functions but callable type objects.
3289
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003290- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003291 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003292 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003293
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003294- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3295 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003296
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003297- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3298 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003299
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003300- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3301 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3302 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3303 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3304
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003305- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3306 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003307
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003308- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3309 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3310 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3311 and __imul__.
3312
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003313- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003314 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3315 is called.
3316
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003317- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3318 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3319 interpreter was compiled.
3320
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003321- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3322 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3323 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003324 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003325 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3326 1, not 2.
3327
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003328- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3329 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3330 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3331 limit.
3332
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003333- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3334 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3335 bug #623464.
3336
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003337- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3338 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3339 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3340 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3341
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003342Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003343-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003344
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003345- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3346
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003347- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3348 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3349 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3350 with Python 2.3a2.
3351
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003352- os.path exposes getctime.
3353
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003354- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003355 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003356 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003357 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003358 unit tests of floating point results.
3359
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003360- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3361 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3362 has been increased.
3363
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003364- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3365 executed.
3366
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003367- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3368 postinstallation script.
3369
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003370- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3371 test the current module.
3372
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003373- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003374 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3375 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3376 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3377 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3378
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003379- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003380 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003381 Ward's Optik package.
3382
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003383- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3384 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3385 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3386 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3387
3388- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3389 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003390 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003391
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003392- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3393 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3394 shelf are binary pickles.
3395
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003396- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3397 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3398
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003399- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3400 modules are iterators now.
3401
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003402- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3403 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3404 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3405 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3406 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3407 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003408
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003409- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3410 with their entity value.
3411
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003412- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3413
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003414- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3415 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003416
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003417- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3418 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003419 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003420
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003421- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3422 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3423 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3424 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3425 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3426 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3427 main():
3428
3429 import locale
3430 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3431
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003432- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3433 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3434
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003435- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3436 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3437 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3438 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3439 to the new standard.
3440
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003441- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3442 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3443 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3444 an extension to the database.
3445
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003446- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3447 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3448 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3449 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003450 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003451
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003452- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003453 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003454
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003455- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3456 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3457 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3458 bounded integers.
3459
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003460- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3461 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3462 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3463 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3464 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3465 in existence.
3466
3467 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3468 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3469 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3470 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3471 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3472 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3473
3474 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3475 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3476 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3477 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3478
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003479- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3480 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3481 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3482
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003483- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3484
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003485- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3486 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3487 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3488 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3489
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003490- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3491 argument.
3492
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003493- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3494 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3495 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3496 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3497 [SF patch 560794].
3498
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003499- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3500 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3501 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003502 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3503 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3504 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003505
3506- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3507 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003508
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003509- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3510 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3511 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3512 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003513
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003514- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3515 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3516 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3517 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3518 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3519
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003520- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003521
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003522- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3523
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003524- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3525 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3526 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3527 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3528 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3529 identical to None.
3530
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003531- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3532 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3533 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3534 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3535 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3536 results now.
3537
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003538- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3539 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3540
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003541- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3542 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3543 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3544 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3545 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3546 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3547 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3548 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3549
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003550- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3551
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003552- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3553 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3554
3555- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3556 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3557 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3558 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3559 and other systems.
3560
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003561- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3562 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3563 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3564 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 +00003565 work well with these.
3566
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003567- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3568
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003569- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003570 connections.
3571
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003572- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3573 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3574 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3575
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003576- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3577 sets
3578
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003579- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3580 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3581 name.
3582
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003583- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3584 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3585 passed in.
3586
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003587- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003588 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003589 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3590 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003591
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003592- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3593
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003594- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3595
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003596- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3597 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3598 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3599
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003600- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3601 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3602 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3603 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003604 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003605
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003606- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003607 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003608 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003609
3610- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3611 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3612 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3613
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003614- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003615 the value of its expression argument.
3616
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003617- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3618 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3619 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3620
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003621- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3622 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3623 skipstone browser was included.
3624
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003625- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3626 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3627
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003628Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003629-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003630
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003631- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3632 names in addition to accepting file names.
3633
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003634- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3635 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3636 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3637 still used and useful.)
3638
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003639- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3640 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3641 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3642 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003643
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003644- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3645 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3646 the generated binary.
3647
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003648Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003649-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003650
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003651- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3652
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003653- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3654 except in the hands of experts.
3655
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003656- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003657 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3658 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3659 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003660
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003661- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3662 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3663 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3664 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3665 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3666 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3667 builds.
3668
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003669- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3670 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3671 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3672 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3673 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3674 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3675 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3676 new type.
3677
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003678- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003679
3680 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3681 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3682 positive infinities.
3683
3684 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3685 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3686 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3687 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3688 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3689 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3690 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3691
3692 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3693
3694 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3695
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003696- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3697 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3698 size of the executable.
3699
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003700- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3701 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3702 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3703 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003704
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003705- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3706
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003707- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3708 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3709 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003710
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003711- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3712 well as Unix.
3713
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003714- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3715 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3716 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3717 modules in the README file for details.
3718
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003719C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003720-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003721
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003722- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3723 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003724 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003725 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003726 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003727
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003728- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3729 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3730 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3731 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3732 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3733 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003734 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003735 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3736 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3737 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3738 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3739 aligned.)
3740
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003741- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3742 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3743 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3744
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003745- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3746 level.
3747
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003748- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3749 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3750 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3751 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3752 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3753
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003754- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3755 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3756 code.
3757
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003758- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3759 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3760 adjusting for negative indices.
3761
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003762- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3763 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3764 object.
3765
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003766- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3767 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3768 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3769
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003770- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3771 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003772
3773- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3774
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003775- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3776 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3777 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3778 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3779
3780- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3781
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003782- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003783
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003784- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003785 without going through the buffer API.
3786
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003787- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003788
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003789- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3790 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3791 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3792 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3793
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003794- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3795 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3796
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003797- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003798 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3799
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003800New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003801-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003802
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003803- OpenVMS is now supported.
3804
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003805- AtheOS is now supported.
3806
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003807- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3808
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003809- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3810
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003811Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003812-----
3813
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003814- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3815 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3816 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003817
3818Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003819-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003820
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003821- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3822 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3823 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3824 bugs.
3825 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003826 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003827 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3828 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003829 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003830
3831- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003832 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003833
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003834- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3835 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3836
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003837- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3838 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003839 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003840 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3841
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003842- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3843 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3844 use files" uninstall option).
3845
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003846- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3847
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003848- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3849 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3850
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003851- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3852 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3853 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3854
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003855- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3856 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3857 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3858 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3859 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003860 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3861 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3862 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003863
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003864- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003865 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003866 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3867 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3868 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3869 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3870 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3871 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3872 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3873 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3874 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3875 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3876 work around.
3877
3878- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3879 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3880 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3881 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3882 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3883 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3884 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3885 specified with O_CREAT too).
3886
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003887Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003888----
3889
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003890- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003891
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003892- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3893 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3894 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3895
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003896- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3897 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3898 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3899
3900- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3901 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3902 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3903 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3904 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3905 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3906 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3907 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003908
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003909- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3910 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3911 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003912
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003913- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3914 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3915 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3916 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3917 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003918
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003919- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3920 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3921 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003922
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003923- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3924 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003925
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003926- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3927 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3928 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3929 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3930 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003931
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003932- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3933 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3934 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3935
3936- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3937 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3938 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003939
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003940- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3941 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3942 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3943 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003944 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003945
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003946- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3947 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003948
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003949- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3950 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003951
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003952- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003953 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003954 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3955 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003956
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003957
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003958What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003959===============================
3960
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003961*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3962
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003963Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003964--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003965
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003966- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3967 with a custom metaclass.
3968
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003969Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003970-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003971
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003972- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3973 are proxies.
3974
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003975Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003976-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003977
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003978- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3979 very short strings.
3980
3981- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3982 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3983 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3984 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3985 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3986
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003987Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003988-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003989
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003990- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3991 close or delete time).
3992
3993- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3994 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3995
3996- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3997
3998- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003999 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004000
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004001Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004002-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004003
4004Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004005-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004006
4007C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004008-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004009
4010New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004011-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004012
4013Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004014-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004015
4016Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004017-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004018
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004019- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4020
4021- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4022 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4023
4024- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4025 deleted at process exit time.
4026
4027- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4028 in backslash.
4029
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004030Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004031----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004032
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004033- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4034 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4035 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4036
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004037
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004038What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004039===========================
4040
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004041*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4042
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004043Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004044--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004045
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004046- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4047 been extensively updated. See
4048
4049 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4050
4051 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4052
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004053- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4054 deleted!
4055
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004056- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4057 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4058 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4059 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4060 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4061
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004062- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4063
4064 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4065 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4066
4067 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4068 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4069 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4070 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4071 supported anyway.
4072
4073 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4074 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4075
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004076- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4077 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4078 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4079 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4080 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004081
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004082- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4083 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4084 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4085
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004086Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004087-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004088
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004089- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4090 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4091 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4092 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4093 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4094 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004095 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4096 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4097 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4098 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004099
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004100- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4101 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4102 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4103
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004104Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004105-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004106
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004107- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4108
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004109Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004110-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004111
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004112- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4113 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4114 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4115 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4116 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4117 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4118
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004119- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4120
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004121- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4122
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004123- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4124
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004125- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4126 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4127 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4128
4129- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4130
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004131Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004132-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004133
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004134- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4135 off a search on Google.
4136
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004137Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004138-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004139
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004140- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4141 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4142 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4143 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4144 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4145 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4146 other platforms should do likewise.
4147
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004148- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4149 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4150 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4151
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004152C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004153-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004154
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004155- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4156 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4157 producing key-value pairs.
4158
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004159- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004160 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004161 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4162 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4163 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4164 previously went unchallenged.
4165
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004166New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004167-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004168
4169Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004170-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004171
4172Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004173-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004174
4175Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004176----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004177
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004178- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4179 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004180
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004181- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4182 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4183 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4184 home.
4185
4186
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004187What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004188===========================
4189
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004190*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4191
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004192Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004193--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004194
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004195- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4196 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004197
4198 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004199 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004200
4201 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4202 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004203 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004204 This needs to be documented.
4205
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004206- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4207 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4208
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004209- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4210 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4211 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4212
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004213- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4214 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4215
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004216- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4217 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4218 class forbids it).
4219
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004220- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4221 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4222 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4223
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004224- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4225
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004226Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004227-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004228
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004229- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4230 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004231 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004232
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004233- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4234 (like 1 + '').
4235
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004236Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004237-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004238
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004239- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4240 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4241 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4242 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004243 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004244 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4245
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004246- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4247 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4248 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4249 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4250
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004251- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4252 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004253 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4254 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4255 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004256
4257- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4258 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004259
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004260- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4261 bytes on its input.
4262
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004263Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004264-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004265
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004266- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004267 convenience function.
4268
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004269- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4270 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4271 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004272 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4273 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4274 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4275 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4276 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4277 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004278
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004279- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4280 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4281 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4282 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4283
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004284- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4285 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4286 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4287
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004288- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4289 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4290 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4291 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4292
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004293- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4294 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004295 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004296 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4297 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4298 new -l and -e options.
4299
4300- statcache is now deprecated.
4301
4302- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4303 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004304 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004305 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4306 time properly taken into account.
4307
4308- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4309 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4310 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4311 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4312
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004313Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004314-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004315
4316Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004317-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004318
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004319- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4320 is built with libdb3 if available.
4321
4322- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4323
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004324C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004325-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004326
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004327- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4328 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4329 PySequence_Size().
4330
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004331- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4332
4333- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4334 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4335 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4336
4337- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4338 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4339
4340- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4341 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4342
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004343New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004344-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004345
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004346- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4347 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4348
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004349- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4350 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4351
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004352- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4353
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004354Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004355-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004356
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004357- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4358 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4359
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004360Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004361-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004362
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004363Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004364----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004365
4366- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4367 removed completely in the next release.
4368
4369- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4370 OSX.
4371
4372- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4373 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4374
4375- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4376
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004377
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004378What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004379===========================
4380
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004381*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4382
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004383Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004384--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004385
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004386- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004387 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004388 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004389 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4390 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004391 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4392 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004393 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4394 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004395
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004396- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4397 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4398
4399- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4400 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4401
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004402Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004403-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004404
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004405- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4406 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4407 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4408 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4409 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4410 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4411 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4412 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4413
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004414- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4415 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4416 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4417 example).
4418
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004419- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004420 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004421 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004422 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004423
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004424- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4425 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4426 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004427 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004428
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004429- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4430 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4431 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4432 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4433 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4434 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4435
4436 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4437
4438 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4439
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004440Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004441-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004442
4443- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4444
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004445- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4446
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004447- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4448 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004449
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004450- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4451 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4452 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4453 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4454 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4455 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004456 attributes.
4457
4458- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4459 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4460 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004461
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004462- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4463 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4464 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004465
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004466- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4467 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4468 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004469 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4470 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4471
4472- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4473 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004474
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004475Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004476-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004477
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004478- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4479 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4480
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004481- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4482 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4483 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4484 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4485
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004486- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4487 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4488 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4489 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4490
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004491 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4492 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4493 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4494 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4495 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4496 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4497 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4498 without losing information).
4499
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004500- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004501 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4502 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4503 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4504 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4505 module).
4506
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004507 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004508 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4509 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4510 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4511 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004512
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004513- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004514 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4515 encoding.
4516
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004517- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4518 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4519
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004520- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004521 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4522
4523- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4524 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4525 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4526 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4527
4528- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4529
4530- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4531 ON, and OFF.
4532
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004533- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4534 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4535
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004536Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004537-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004538
4539- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4540 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4541 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004542
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004543- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4544 been added: -X and -E.
4545
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004546Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004547-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004548
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004549- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4550 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4551
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004552C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004553-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004554
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004555- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4556 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4557 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4558 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4559 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4560
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004561- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4562 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4563 as long) arguments.
4564
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004565- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4566 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4567 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4568 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4569 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4570 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4571
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004572- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4573 input.
4574
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004575New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004576-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004577
4578Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004579-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004580
4581Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004582-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004583
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004584- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4585 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4586 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4587
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004588- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4589 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4590 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004591 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004592
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004593 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4594 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4595 import signal
4596 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004597
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004598 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004599 while 1:
4600 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004601 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004602 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4603 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4604 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4605 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004606
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004607
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004608What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4609===========================
4610
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004611*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4612
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004613Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004614--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004615
4616- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4617 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4618 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4619
4620- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4621 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4622 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4623 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4624 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4625 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4626 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004627
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004628- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004629 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004630 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4631 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4632 associate a docstring with a property.
4633
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004634- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4635 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4636 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4637 other built-in object types.
4638
4639- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4640 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4641 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4642 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4643 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4644
4645- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4646 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4647
4648- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4649 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004650 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004651 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4652 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4653 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4654 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4655 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4656
4657- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4658 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4659 class.
4660
4661- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4662 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4663 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4664 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4665
4666- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4667 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4668 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4669 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4670
4671- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4672 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4673
4674- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4675 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4676 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4677 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4678 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004679 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004680 with the same value as s.
4681
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004682- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4683
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004684Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004685----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004686
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004687- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4688
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004689- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4690 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4691 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4692 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4693 objects.
4694
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004695- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4696 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004697 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4698 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4699
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004700- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4701 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4702 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4703
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004704Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004705-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004706
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004707- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4708 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4709 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4710 by the instances.
4711
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004712- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4713 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4714 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4715
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004716- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4717 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4718 before the entire comparison is complete.
4719
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004720- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4721 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4722 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4723
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004724- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4725 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4726 getwriter().
4727
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004728- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4729 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4730
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004731- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004732 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4733 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4734
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004735- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4736 iterable object.
4737
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004738- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4739 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004740
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004741- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4742 authentication.
4743
4744- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4745 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004746
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004747- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004748 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4749 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4750 a sample driver.)
4751
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004752Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004753-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004754
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004755- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4756 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4757 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4758 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4759 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4760 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4761 kernel has large file support.
4762
4763- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4764 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4765 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4766 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4767 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4768
4769- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4770 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4771 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4772
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004773C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004774-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004775
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004776- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4777 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4778
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004779New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004780-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004781
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004782- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4783 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4784
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004785Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004786-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004787
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004788- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4789 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4790 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4791 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4792 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4793
4794- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4795 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4796 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4797 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4798
4799- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4800 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4801
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004802Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004803-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004804
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004805- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004806 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4807 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004808
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004809
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004810What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4811===========================
4812
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004813*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4814
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004815Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004816----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004817
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004818- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4819 big to represent as a C double.
4820
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004821- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4822 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4823 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4824 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4825 restriction).
4826
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004827- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4828 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4829 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4830 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4831 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4832
4833 >>> dir([])
4834 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4835 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4836 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4837 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4838 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4839 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4840 'reverse', 'sort']
4841
4842 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4843
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004844- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004845 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4846 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4847 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4848 OverflowError exception.
4849
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004850- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004851 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004852 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4853 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4854 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4855 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4856 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004857 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004858 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4859 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4860
4861 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4862 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4863 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4864 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004865
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004866- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004867 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4868 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4869 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4870 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4871 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4872 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4873 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4874 once it is created.
4875
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004876- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4877 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4878 (key, value) pairs.
4879
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004880- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004881 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4882 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4883
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004884- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4885 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4886 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4887 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4888 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004889
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004890- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004891 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4892 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4893
4894 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4895
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004896- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004897 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4898
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004899Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004900-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004901
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004902- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004903 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4904 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004905
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004906- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4907 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4908 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4909 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4910 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4911 in this area anymore).
4912
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004913- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4914 threading.Timer.
4915
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004916- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4917 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4918
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004919- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004920 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4921
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004922- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004923 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4924 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4925 converted to Python longs.
4926
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004927- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004928 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4929
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004930- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4931 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4932 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4933
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004934Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004935-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004936
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004937- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4938 division operators as per PEP 238.
4939
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004940Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004941-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004942
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004943- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4944 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4945 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4946 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4947
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004948C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004949-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004950
4951- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004952
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004953- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4954 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004955 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004956
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004957 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4958 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004959 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004960 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004961
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004962- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004963 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4964 module:
4965
4966 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004967
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004968 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4969 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004970
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004971 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4972 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004973
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004974 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4975
4976 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4977
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004978- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004979 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4980 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4981 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004982
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004983New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004984-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004985
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004986- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4987 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4988 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4989 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4990 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004991
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004992Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004993-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004994
4995Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004996-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004997
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004998- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4999 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5000 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5001 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005002 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5003 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5004 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5005 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5006 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005007
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005008- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005009 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5010
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005011
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005012What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5013===========================
5014
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005015*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5016
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005017Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005018-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005019
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005020- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5021 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5022
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005023- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5024 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5025 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005026
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005027- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5028 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5029 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5030 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005031
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005032- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5033
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005034- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005035
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005036Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005037-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005038
5039- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005040 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005041 the module docstring for details.
5042
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005043Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005044-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005045
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005046- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005047 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5048 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5049 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005050
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005051- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5052 Nick Mathewson.
5053
5054Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005055----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005056
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005057- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5058 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5059 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5060 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5061 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5062 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5063 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5064 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5065
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005066- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5067 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5068 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5069 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5070
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005071- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5072 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5073 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5074 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5075 come a long way).
5076
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005077- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5078 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5079 write filters for these warnings).
5080
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005081- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5082 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5083 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5084 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5085 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5086
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005087- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5088 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5089 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5090 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5091 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5092 older distribution.
5093
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005094Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005095-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005096
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005097- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5098 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005099 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005100
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005101- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5102 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5103 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5104
5105- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5106
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005107- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5108
5109- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5110
5111- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5112
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005113- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005114
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005115- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5116
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005117New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005118-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005119
5120C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005121-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005122
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005123- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5124 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5125 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5126 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5127 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5128 against buffer overruns.
5129
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005130- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005131 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5132 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005133 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5134 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5135 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5136
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005137- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5138 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5139 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5140 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5141 deprecated.
5142
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005143Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005144-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005145
5146- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5147 relevant is found.
5148
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005149
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005150What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005151===========================
5152
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005153*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5154
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005155Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005156----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005157
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005158- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5159 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5160 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5161 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5162 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5163 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5164 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5165 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005166 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005167 repaired.
5168
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005169- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005170 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005171 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5172 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5173 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5174 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5175 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5176 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5177 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5178 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5179
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005180- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5181 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5182 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5183 leading BMO character).
5184
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005185- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5186 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5187 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5188
5189 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5190 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5191 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005192
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005193 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5194 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5195 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5196 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5197 for various simple to use conversions.
5198
5199 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5200 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5201
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005202 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5203 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5204 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5205 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5206 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5207 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5208 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5209 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5210 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5211 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5212 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5213 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5214 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5215 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5216 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005217
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005218- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5219 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5220 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005221 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005222 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005223
5224 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005225 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5226 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5227 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5228 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5229 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005230 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5231 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005232
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005233 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5234 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5235 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005236 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005237
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005238- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5239 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5240 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5241 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5242 floating arithmetic,
5243
5244 x = 9007199254740992.0
5245 print long(x)
5246
5247 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5248 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5249 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5250 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5251 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5252 functions are of good quality).
5253
5254 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5255 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5256 algorithms to break.
5257
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005258- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5259 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5260 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5261 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5262 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5263 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5264 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5265 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5266 order.
5267
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005268- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5269 operation along the most common code paths.
5270
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005271- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5272 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5273
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005274- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5275 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5276 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5277 {}.update(UserDict())
5278
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005279- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5280 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5281 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5282 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5283 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5284 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5285 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5286 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5287
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005288- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005289 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005290
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005291 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005292 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5293 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005294 join() method of strings
5295 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005296 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5297 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005298 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005299 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005300
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005301- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5302 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5303
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005304- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5305 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5306
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005307- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5308 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5309 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5310 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5311
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005312- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5313 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005314 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005315 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5316 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005317
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005318- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5319
5320
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005321Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005322-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005323
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005324- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005325 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005326 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5327 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5328
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005329- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5330 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5331
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005332- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5333 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5334 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5335 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5336
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005337- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5338 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5339 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5340
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005341- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5342
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005343- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5344
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005345- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5346 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5347 that are still imported into string.py).
5348
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005349- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5350
5351- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5352 Now it does.
5353
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005354- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5355
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005356- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5357 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5358 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5359 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5360 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005361 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5362 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005363
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005364- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5365 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5366 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5367 'help(object)'.
5368
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005369Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005370-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005371
5372- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005373 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005374 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5375 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5376
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005377- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005378 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5379 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005380
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005381C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005382-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005383
5384- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5385 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005386
5387----
5388
5389**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**