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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000015- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
16 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
17 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
18
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000019- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
20
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000021- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
22 reference counts in some error exit cases.
23
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000024- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
25 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
26 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
27 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
28 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
29 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
30 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
31 realloc.
32
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000033- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
34 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
35
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000036- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
37 like their int counterparts.
38
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000039- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
40 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
41 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
42 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
43 for a longer write-up of the problem).
44
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000045- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
46 serializing floats.
47
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000048- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
49 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
50 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
51
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000052- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
53 278.
54
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000055- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
56 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
57 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
58 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
59 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
60 PyNumber_*().
61 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
62
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000063- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
64 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
65 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
66 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
67
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000068- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
69 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
70 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
71 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
72 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
73
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000074- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
75 disabled caused a crash.
76
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000077- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
78 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
79
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000080- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000081 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
82
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000083- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
84
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000085- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000086 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
87 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
88 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000089
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000090- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
91
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000092- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
93 returning None.
94
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000095- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000096 ('\') with a specific error message.
97
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000098- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
99
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000100- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
101 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
102
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000103- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000104 an ferror() call.
105
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000106- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
107 list.sort().
108
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000109- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
110 (2+3) --> (5).
111
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000112- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
113
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000114- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
115 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000116
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000117- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
118 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
119 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
120
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000121- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
122 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
123 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
124
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000125Extension Modules
126-----------------
127
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000128- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
129 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
130
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000131- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
132 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
133 for large or negative values.
134
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000135- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000136 implemented treated all integer values except 1 as false.
137
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000138- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
139
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000140- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
141 if available on the platform.
142
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000143- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
144 available on the platform.
145
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000146- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
147 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
148
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000149- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
150
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000151- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
152 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
153 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
154
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000155- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
156
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000157- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
158 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
159
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000160- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000161 file size.
162
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000163- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
164
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000165- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
166 {remove_history,replace_history}
167
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000168- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
169 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000170
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000171- stat_float_times is now True.
172
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000173- array.array objects are now picklable.
174
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000175- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
176 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
177
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000178- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
179 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
180 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
181
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000182- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
183 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000184
185Library
186-------
187
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000188- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
189
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000190- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
191 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
192
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000193- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
194 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
195 Tkdnd.
196
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000197- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
198 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
199
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000200- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
201 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
202
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000203- textwrap now processes text chucks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
204 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
205
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000206- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
207 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
208
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000209- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
210 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
211
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000212- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
213 though this can be missing in embedded interpreters
214
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000215- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
216
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000217- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
218 error messages.
219
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000220- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
221
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000222- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
223 Bug #1224621.
224
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000225- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
226 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
227 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
228 terminates by raising StopIteration.
229
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000230- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
231
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000232- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
233 component of the path.
234
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000235- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
236 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
237 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
238 class at all.
239
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000240- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
241 files to PyPI.
242
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000243- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
244 them to PyPI.
245
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000246- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
247 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
248 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
249 work as expected.
250
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000251- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
252 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
253
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000254- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000255 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
256
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000257- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
258
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000259- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
260 to build.
261
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000262- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
263 symbolic links on Windows.
264
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000265- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000266 profile.py if available.
267
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000268- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
269
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000270- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
271 in LWPCookieJar.
272
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000273- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
274
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000275- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
276
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000277- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
278
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000279- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
280
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000281- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
282
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000283- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
284
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000285- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
286
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000287- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
288
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000289- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
290 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
291 be exploited in various ways.
292
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000293- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
294
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000295- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
296
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000297- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
298
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000299- Enhancements to the csv module:
300
301 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000302 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000303 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000304 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
305 reporting.
306 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
307 dictates.
308 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000309 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000310 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000311 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
312 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000313 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
314 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000315 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000316 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
317 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
318 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
319 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
320 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
321 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
322 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
323 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
324 without first creating a dialect class.
325 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
326 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
327 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000328 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000329 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
330 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000331 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
332 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
333 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
334 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000335 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
336 This has been fixed.
337
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000338- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
339 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
340 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
341 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
342
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000343- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
344
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000345- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
346 (Bug #951915).
347
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000348- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
349 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
350 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
351 encoding alias table
352
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000353- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
354
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000355- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
356 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
357
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000358- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
359
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000360- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
361
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000362- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
363
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000364- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
365
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000366- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
367
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000368- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
369 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
370 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
371
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000372- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000373 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000374
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000375- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
376 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
377 tokenizer with very long source lines.
378
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000379- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
380 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
381
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000382- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
383 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000384
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000385- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
386 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
387
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000388- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
389 correctly.
390
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000391- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
392 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
393 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
394 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
395 between two lines.
396
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000397
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000398Build
399-----
400
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000401- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
402 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
403
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000404- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
405 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
406
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000407- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
408 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
409 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000410 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000411
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000412- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
413 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
414 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
415
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000416- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
417
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000418- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
419 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
420
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000421- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
422 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
423 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
424 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
425 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
426 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
427 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
428 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
429
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000430- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
431 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
432 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
433 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
434
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000435
436C API
437-----
438
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000439- Removed PyRange_New().
440
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000441
442Tests
443-----
444
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000445- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000446
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000447
448Documentation
449-------------
450
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000451- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
452
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000453- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
454
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000455- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
456
457- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
458
459- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
460
461- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
462
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000463- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
464 Closes bug #1166582.
465
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000466- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
467 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
468 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
469
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000470Mac
471---
472
473
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000474New platforms
475-------------
476
477- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
478
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000479
480Tools/Demos
481-----------
482
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000483- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
484
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000485- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000486
487
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000488What's New in Python 2.4 final?
489===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000490
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000491*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000492
493Core and builtins
494-----------------
495
496- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
497 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
498 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
499
500
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000501What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
502==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000503
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000504*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000505
506Core and builtins
507-----------------
508
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000509- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
510 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
511 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
512
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000513
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000514Library
515-------
516
517- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
518 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
519 raised is re-raised.
520
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000521- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
522 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
523
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000524- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
525 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
526 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
527 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
528 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
529 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
530 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
531 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
532 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
533 by the slice are recomputed now.
534
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000535- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000536
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000537Build
538-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000539
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000540- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
541 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
542 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000543
544C API
545-----
546
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000547- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
548
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000549
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000550What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
551================================
552
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000553*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000554
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000555License
556-------
557
558The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
559is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
560changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
561Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
562intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
563durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
564the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
565License::
566
567 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
568
569says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
570to Python 2.1.1.
571
572The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
573License Version 2.
574
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000575Core and builtins
576-----------------
577
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000578- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
579 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
580 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
581 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
582 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
583 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
584 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
585 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
586 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
587 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
588
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000589- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000590
591Extension Modules
592-----------------
593
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000594- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
595 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
596 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
597 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000598
599Library
600-------
601
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000602- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
603 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
604 returned.
605
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000606- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
607
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000608- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
609 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
610
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000611- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
612
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000613- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
614 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000615
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000616- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
617
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000618- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
619
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000620- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000621 the source code is updated and reloaded.
622
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000623Build
624-----
625
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000626- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000627
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000628What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
629================================
630
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000631*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000632
633Core and builtins
634-----------------
635
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000636- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000637 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
638
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000639- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
640 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
641 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
642 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
643
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000644- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
645 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
646
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000647- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
648 constant.
649
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000650- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
651 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
652 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
653 large), and to anomalies such as
654 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
655 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
656 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
657 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000658
659Extension modules
660-----------------
661
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000662- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
663 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000664 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
665 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
666 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000667
668Library
669-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000670
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000671- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000672 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000673 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
674 --swig-cpp.
675
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000676- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
677 it is set.
678
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000679- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000680
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000681- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
682 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
683 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
684 Closes bug #1039270.
685
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000686- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000687
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000688 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000689 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
690 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
691 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
692 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
693 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
694 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
695 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
696 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
697 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
698 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
699 + Updates to documentation.
700
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000701- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
702 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
703 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
704 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
705
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000706- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000707
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000708- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
709 applications should use the getmember function.
710
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000711- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
712
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000713- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
714 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
715 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
716 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
717 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
718 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
719 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
720 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
721 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
722
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000723- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
724 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000725 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000726
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000727- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
728 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
729 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
730 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
731 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
732 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
733 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
734 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000735
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000736- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
737 the new public features (of which there are many).
738
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000739- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000740 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
741 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
742 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
743 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000744 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000745
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000746- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
747
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000748- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
749 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
750 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
751 options.
752
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000753- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
754 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
755 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
756 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
757 conditions under which non-string values work.
758
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000759Build
760-----
761
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000762- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
763 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
764 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
765
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000766- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
767 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
768 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
769 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
770 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000771
772C API
773-----
774
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000775- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
776 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
777
778- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
779
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000780- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
781 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
782 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
783 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
784 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
785 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
786 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
787 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
788 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
789
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000790- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
791
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000792- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
793 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
794 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000795
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000796Tests
797-----
798
799- test__locale ported to unittest
800
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000801Mac
802---
803
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000804- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
805 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
806 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000807
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000808Tools/Demos
809-----------
810
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000811- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
812 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
813 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
814 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
815 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000816
817
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000818What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
819=================================
820
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000821*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000822
823Core and builtins
824-----------------
825
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000826- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000827 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
828
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000829- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
830 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
831 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
832 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
833 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
834 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
835 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
836 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000837 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
838 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
839 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
840 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
841 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000842
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000843- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
844 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
845 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
846 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
847 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
848
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000849- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
850
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000851- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
852 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
853
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000854- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
855 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
856 modified the list.
857
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000858- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
859 functions is now writable.
860
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000861- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
862 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
863 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
864 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
865
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000866- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
867 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
868 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
869 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
870 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000871
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000872- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
873 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
874
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000875Extension modules
876-----------------
877
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000878- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
879
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000880- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
881 data.
882
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000883- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
884 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
885 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
886 supposed to have been truncated away.
887
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000888- Added socket.socketpair().
889
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000890- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
891 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
892
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000893- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000894 versions of Python, have now been removed.
895
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000896Library
897-------
898
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000899- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000900 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000901
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000902- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
903 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
904
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000905- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
906 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
907
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000908- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
909
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000910- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
911 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000912
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000913- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
914 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
915
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000916- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
917
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000918- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
919
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000920- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
921
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000922- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
923 Percivall.
924
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000925- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
926 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
927
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000928- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
929 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
930 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000931 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000932
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000933- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
934 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
935 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
936 and exponent.
937
938- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
939
940- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +0000941 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000942 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
943
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000944- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
945 to the readline module.
946
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000947- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000948 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
949 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000950
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000951- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
952 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
953 contains symlinks.
954
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000955- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
956 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
957
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000958- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
959 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
960 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
961
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000962- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
963 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
964 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
965 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
966 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
967 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
968 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
969 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
970 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
971 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
972 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
973 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
974 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
975
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000976- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
977
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000978Tools/Demos
979-----------
980
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000981- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
982 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
983
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000984- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
985
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000986Build
987-----
988
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000989- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
990 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
991 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
992 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
993 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
994 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
995 plans to do so.
996
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000997- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
998 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
999
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001000- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1001 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1002
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001003- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1004 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1005
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001006- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1007 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1008
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001009- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1010 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1011
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001012C API
1013-----
1014
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001015..
1016
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001017Documentation
1018-------------
1019
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001020- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1021 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1022
1023- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1024 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1025 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001026
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001027New platforms
1028-------------
1029
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001030- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1031
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001032Tests
1033-----
1034
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001035..
1036
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001037Windows
1038-------
1039
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001040- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1041 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1042 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1043 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1044 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1045 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1046 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1047 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1048 the problem.
1049
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001050Mac
1051---
1052
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001053..
1054
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001055
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001056What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1057=================================
1058
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001059*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001060
1061Core and builtins
1062-----------------
1063
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001064- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1065 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1066 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1067 sensitive code.
1068
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001069- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001070 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001071
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001072 @staticmethod
1073 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001074
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001075 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001076
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001077- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1078 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1079 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1080 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1081 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1082 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1083 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1084 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1085 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1086 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1087 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1088
1089 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1090 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1091 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1092 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1093 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1094 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1095 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1096
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001097- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1098 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1099
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001100- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001101 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001102
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001103- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001104 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001105 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1106
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001107- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001108 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1109 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1110
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001111- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1112 types that support garbage collection.
1113
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001114- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1115
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001116- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1117 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1118 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1119 Jython.
1120
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001121- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1122
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001123- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1124 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1125
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001126- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1127 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1128 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001129
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001130- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1131 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1132 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1133
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001134Extension modules
1135-----------------
1136
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001137- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1138
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001139Library
1140-------
1141
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001142- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1143 TIS-620
1144
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001145- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1146 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1147 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1148 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1149 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1150 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1151 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1152 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1153 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1154 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1155
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001156- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1157
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001158- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1159 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1160 same as when the argument is omitted).
1161 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1162
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001163- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1164
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001165- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1166 schemes are offered.
1167
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001168- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1169
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001170- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1171 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1172 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1173
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001174- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1175
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001176- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1177 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1178
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001179- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1180 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1181 when dummy_threading is being used.
1182
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001183- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1184 from a tarfile.
1185
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001186- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001187 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001188
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001189- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1190 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1191 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1192 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1193
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001194- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1195 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1196
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001197- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1198 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1199 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1200 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1201 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1202 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1203 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1204 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1205 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1206 by some other method in progress).
1207
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001208- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1209 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1210 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001211
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001212- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1213
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001214- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1215 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1216 AM Kuchling.
1217
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001218- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1219 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1220 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1221
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001222- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1223 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1224 instead of unsigned.
1225
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001226- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001227 no longer part of the public API.
1228
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001229- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1230 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1231 string methods of the same name).
1232
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001233- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001234 SF patch 945642.
1235
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001236- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1237
1238 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1239
1240 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1241 DocTestSuites.
1242
1243- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1244 that provide thread-local data.
1245
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001246- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1247 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1248
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001249- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1250
1251- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1252 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1253 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1254
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001255- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1256
1257 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1258 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1259 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001260
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001261 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1262 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1263 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1264 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1265
1266 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1267 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1268
1269 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1270 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1271 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1272 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1273
1274 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1275 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1276 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1277 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1278 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1279
1280 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1281 wrapping help output.
1282
1283 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1284 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1285 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001286
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001287C API
1288-----
1289
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001290- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1291 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1292 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1293 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1294 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1295 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1296 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1297 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1298 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1299 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1300 its visible semantics have not changed.
1301
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001302- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1303 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1304
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001305Documentation
1306-------------
1307
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001308- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001309
1310 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001311 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001312
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001313 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001314
1315 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1316
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001317- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001318
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001319Tests
1320-----
1321
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001322- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001323 platforms that use the Makefile.
1324
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001325- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1326 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1327 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1328
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001329
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001330What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1331=================================
1332
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001333*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001334
1335Core and builtins
1336-----------------
1337
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001338- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1339 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1340 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1341 objects now (one object instead of three).
1342
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001343- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1344 Windows DLLs.
1345
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001346- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1347 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001348
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001349- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1350 a new .pyc magic.
1351
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001352- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1353 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1354 be there.
1355
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001356- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1357 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1358 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1359
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001360- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1361 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1362 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1363
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001364- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1365
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001366- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1367 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1368 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001369
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001370- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1371 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1372
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001373- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1374
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001375- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001376 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001377
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001378- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1379
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001380- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1381
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001382- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1383 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1384
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001385- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1386 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1387 Fixes bug #858016 .
1388
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001389- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1390 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1391 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1392
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001393- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1394 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1395 improves their performance (about 35%).
1396
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001397- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1398 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1399 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1400
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001401- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1402 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1403 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1404 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1405
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001406- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1407 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001408 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001409 length is not known).
1410
1411- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1412 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001413 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1414 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001415 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1416
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001417- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1418 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1419
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001420- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1421 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1422 keyword arguments.
1423
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001424- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1425 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1426 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1427
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001428- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1429 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1430 cases.
1431
1432- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1433 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1434 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1435 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1436 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1437 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1438 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1439 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1440 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1441 a release build.
1442
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001443- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1444 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1445
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001446- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001447 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001448
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001449- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1450 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1451 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1452 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1453 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1454 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1455 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1456 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1457 destroyed.
1458
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001459- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1460 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1461 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1462 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1463 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1464 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1465 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1466 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1467
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001468- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1469 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1470 character other than a space.
1471
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001472- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1473 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1474 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1475 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1476 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1477 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1478 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1479 attributes with the same name.
1480
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001481- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1482 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1483 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1484 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1485 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1486 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1487 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1488 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1489 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1490 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1491 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1492 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1493 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1494 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001495
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001496- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1497 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1498 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1499 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1500 This has been repaired.
1501
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001502- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1503
1504- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1505
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001506- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1507 over a sequence.
1508
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001509- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001510 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001511
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001512- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1513
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001514- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1515 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1516 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1517 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1518 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1519 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1520 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1521 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1522
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001523- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1524 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1525 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1526
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001527- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1528 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1529 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1530 freelist.
1531
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001532- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1533 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1534
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001535- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1536 number.
1537
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001538- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1539 a TypeError exception.
1540
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001541- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1542 820195.
1543
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001544- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1545 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1546 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1547
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001548- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001549 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1550 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001551
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001552- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1553 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1554 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1555
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001556- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1557 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001558 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001559
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001560- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001561 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1562 the first call.
1563
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001564
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001565Extension modules
1566-----------------
1567
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001568- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1569 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1570
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001571- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1572 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1573 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1574 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1575 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1576 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1577 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001578
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001579- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1580
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001581- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1582
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001583- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1584 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1585
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001586- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1587 fewer false positives.
1588
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001589- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1590 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1591
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001592- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001593 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1594
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001595- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001596 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001597 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001598 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1599 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001600
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001601- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1602 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1603 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1604 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1605
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001606- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1607 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1608 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1609 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1610 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1611 #897625.
1612
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001613- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1614 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1615
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001616- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1617 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1618 and pops on either side of the deque.
1619
1620- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1621 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1622
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001623- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1624 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1625 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1626 other functions that expect a function argument.
1627
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001628- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1629
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001630- os.getsid was added.
1631
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001632- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1633 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1634 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1635
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001636- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1637
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001638- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1639
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001640- readline.clear_history was added.
1641
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001642- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1643
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001644- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1645
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001646- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1647
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001648- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1649
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001650- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1651
1652- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1653
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001654- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1655
1656- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1657
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001658- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1659 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1660 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1661
1662- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1663 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1664 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1665 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1666 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1667 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1668 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1669
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001670- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1671 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1672 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1673 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001674
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001675- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001676 iterators from a single iterable.
1677
1678- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1679 of raising a TypeError exception.
1680
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001681- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1682 as parameter.
1683
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001684Library
1685-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001686
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001687- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1688 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1689 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001690
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001691- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1692 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1693 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001694
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001695- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001696
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001697- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1698 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001699
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001700- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1701 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1702
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001703- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1704
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001705- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001706 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001707
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001708- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001709 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001710
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001711- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1712
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001713- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1714 on cygwin and mingw32.
1715
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001716- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1717
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001718- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1719 module.
1720
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001721- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1722 installation scheme for all platforms.
1723
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001724- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001725 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001726
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001727- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1728 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1729 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1730
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001731- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1732 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1733 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1734
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001735- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1736
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001737- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1738
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001739- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1740 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1741
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001742- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1743 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1744 type pattern with the same value exists.
1745
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001746- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1747 when run from the command prompt).
1748
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001749- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1750 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1751
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001752- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1753 default sort).
1754
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001755- Added global runctx function to profile module
1756
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001757- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1758
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001759- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1760
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001761- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1762
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001763- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001764 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1765 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1766 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1767 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1768 accordingly.
1769
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001770- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1771 decoding standards.
1772
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001773- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1774 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1775 called for all requests.
1776
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001777- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1778 they are passed to the compiler.
1779
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001780- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1781 indent, width and depth.
1782
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001783- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1784 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1785
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001786- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1787 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1788
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001789- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1790
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001791- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1792
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001793- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1794
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001795- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1796 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1797
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001798- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001799 for better performance.
1800
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001801- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001802
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001803- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1804 a string).
1805
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001806- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1807
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001808- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1809
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001810- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1811
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001812- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1813
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001814- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1815 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1816 list of fieldnames.
1817
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001818- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1819 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1820
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001821- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1822
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001823- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1824 empty lists.
1825
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001826- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1827 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1828 and shelves.
1829
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001830- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1831 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1832
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001833- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001834 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1835 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001836
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001837- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1838 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001839 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001840
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001841- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001842 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1843 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1844
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001845- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1846 and removed in Py2.4.
1847
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001848- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1849
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001850- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1851
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001852Tools/Demos
1853-----------
1854
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001855- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1856 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1857
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001858- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1859
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001860- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1861 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1862 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1863 destination in situations where both files are given.
1864
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001865- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1866 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1867 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1868 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1869
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001870- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1871
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001872- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1873 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1874 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1875 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1876 now.
1877
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001878- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1879 in effect
1880
1881- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1882 C-c C-h
1883
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001884- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1885 -d option was given.
1886
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001887Build
1888-----
1889
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001890- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1891 build under OS X.
1892
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001893- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1894 --enable-profiling.
1895
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001896- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1897 is configured --with-tsc.
1898
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001899- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1900 on AMD64.
1901
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001902- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1903 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1904
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001905- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1906 removed.
1907
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001908- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1909 supported (see PEP 11).
1910
1911- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1912
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001913- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1914
1915- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1916 (see PEP 11).
1917
1918- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1919 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1920
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001921C API
1922-----
1923
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001924- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1925 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1926 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1927
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001928- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1929 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1930 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1931 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1932
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001933- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1934 generator objects.
1935
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001936- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1937 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001938 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1939 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001940
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001941- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1942 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1943
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001944- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1945 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1946 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1947 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1948 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1949
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001950- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1951 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1952 about 10% faster.
1953
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001954- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1955 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1956
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001957- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1958 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1959 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1960 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1961
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001962Windows
1963-------
1964
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001965- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1966 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1967 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1968 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1969
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001970- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1971 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1972 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1973
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001974
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001975What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1976===============================
1977
1978*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1979
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001980IDLE
1981----
1982
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001983- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1984 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1985 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1986 context-menu actions.
1987
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001988- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1989 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1990 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1991 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1992 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1993 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1994 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1995 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1996 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1997
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001998
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001999What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2000=============================================
2001
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002002*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002003
2004Core and builtins
2005-----------------
2006
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002007- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002008 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002009 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2010
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002011Extension modules
2012-----------------
2013
2014- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2015 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2016 than once. This has been fixed.
2017
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002018- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2019 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2020 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2021 call.
2022
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002023- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2024
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002025Library
2026-------
2027
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002028- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2029 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2030
2031- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2032 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2033 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2034 restored.
2035
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002036IDLE
2037----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002038
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002039- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002040
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002041Build
2042-----
2043
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002044- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2045 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2046
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002047C API
2048-----
2049
2050Windows
2051-------
2052
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002053- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2054 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2055
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002056- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2057
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002058Mac
2059---
2060
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002061- Various fixes to pimp.
2062
2063- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2064
2065- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2066 more problems than it solves.
2067
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002068
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002069What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2070=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002071
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002072*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2073
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002074Core and builtins
2075-----------------
2076
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002077- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2078 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2079
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002080- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2081 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002082 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002083
2084- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2085 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2086 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002087 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002088
2089- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2090 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002091
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002092- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2093 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2094 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2095
2096- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002097 770247.
2098
2099- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002100
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002101Extension modules
2102-----------------
2103
2104- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2105 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2106
2107- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2108
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002109- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2110
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002111- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2112 contained within the _strptime module.
2113
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002114- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2115 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2116
2117- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002118 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2119
2120- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2121 the find_class attribute, if present.
2122
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002123- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002124
2125 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2126 (SF bug 763298).
2127
2128 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002129 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2130 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2131 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002132
2133 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2134
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002135Library
2136-------
2137
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002138- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2139
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002140- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2141 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2142 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2143 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2144 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2145 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2146 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2147 or Tester().
2148
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002149- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2150 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2151 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2152 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2153 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2154 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2155 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2156 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2157 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002158
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002159 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002160
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002161- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2162 weren't before was an oversight.
2163
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002164- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2165 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2166
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002167- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2168 when there are no lines.
2169
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002170- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2171 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2172
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002173- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2174 to child processes.
2175
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002176- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2177
2178- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2179
2180- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2181 xmlrpclib.
2182
2183- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2184 responses.
2185
2186- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2187 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2188
2189- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2190 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2191 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2192
2193- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2194 used as patterns.
2195
2196- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2197 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2198 than Tk 8.3.
2199
2200- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2201
2202- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002203
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002204Tools/Demos
2205-----------
2206
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002207- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2208
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002209- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2210
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002211- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002212
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002213Build
2214-----
2215
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002216- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2217
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002218- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2219
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002220- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2221 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002222
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002223- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2224 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2225 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002226
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002227C API
2228-----
2229
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002230- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2231 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2232
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002233Windows
2234-------
2235
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002236- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2237 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2238 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2239 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2240 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2241 Python exception ::
2242
2243 thread.error: can't start new thread
2244
2245 is raised now.
2246
2247- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2248 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2249 instead of from DLL teardown.
2250
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002251Mac
2252---
2253
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002254- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002255 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002256 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2257 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2258 the executable in the bundle.
2259
2260- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002261
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002262- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2263
2264- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2265 on Panther.
2266
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002267What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2268================================
2269
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002270*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002271
2272Core and builtins
2273-----------------
2274
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002275- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2276 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2277 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2278 with the -i option.
2279
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002280- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2281 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2282
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002283- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2284 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2285
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002286- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2287 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2288 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2289 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2290 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2291 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2292 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2293 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2294 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2295 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2296 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2297 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2298 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002299
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002300- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2301 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2302 embedded in a lambda expression.
2303
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002304- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2305 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2306 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2307 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2308 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2309
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002310- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2311 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2312 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2313
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002314- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2315 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2316
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002317- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2318 It's writable again.
2319
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002320- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2321 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2322 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002323 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002324
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002325- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2326 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2327 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2328
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002329Extension modules
2330-----------------
2331
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002332- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2333 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2334
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002335- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2336 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2337 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2338 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2339
2340- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2341 collection.
2342
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002343- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2344 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2345 unique within a single program run.
2346
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002347- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2348 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2349
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002350- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2351 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2352
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002353- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2354 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002355
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002356- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2357
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002358- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2359 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2360
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002361- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2362 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2363 for many BSD-derived systems.
2364
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002365
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002366Library
2367-------
2368
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002369- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2370 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2371 primary ones:
2372
2373 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2374 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2375 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2376
2377 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2378 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2379 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2380 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2381 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2382 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2383
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002384- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2385 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2386 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2387 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2388 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2389 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2390 argument.
2391
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002392- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2393 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2394 in the archive.
2395
2396- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2397 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2398
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002399- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2400 569574).
2401
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002402- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2403 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2404 no more.
2405
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002406- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2407 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2408 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2409 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2410 code coverage.
2411
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002412- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2413 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2414 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002415 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2416 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002417
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002418- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2419 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2420 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002421 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002422
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002423- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2424
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002425- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2426 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2427 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2428 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2429
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002430- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2431 handling.
2432
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002433- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2434 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2435
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002436- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2437 in socket.py.
2438
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002439- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2440
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002441- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2442 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2443 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2444 opener with proxy support.
2445
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002446- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2447
2448- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2449
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002450Tools/Demos
2451-----------
2452
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002453- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2454
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002455- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2456
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002457- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2458 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002459
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002460- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2461 files.
2462
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002463Build
2464-----
2465
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002466- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002467 different root directory.
2468
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002469C API
2470-----
2471
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002472- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2473 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2474 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2475 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2476 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2477 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2478 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2479 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2480 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2481 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2482
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002483- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2484 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2485 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2486 from Python.
2487
2488
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002489New platforms
2490-------------
2491
2492None this time.
2493
2494Tests
2495-----
2496
2497- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2498 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2499
2500Windows
2501-------
2502
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002503- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2504
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002505- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2506 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2507 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2508 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2509 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2510 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2511 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2512 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2513 that's what it's for.
2514
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002515Mac
2516---
2517
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002518- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2519 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2520 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2521 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002522- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2523 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2524- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002525
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002526SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2527------------------------------------
2528
2529430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2530598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2531622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2532661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2533683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2534697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2535713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2536724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2537727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2538729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2539730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2540731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2541732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2542733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2543735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2544740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2545744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2546745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2547747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2548749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2549751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2550753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2551755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2552757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2553760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2554
2555
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002556What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2557================================
2558
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002559*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002560
2561Core and builtins
2562-----------------
2563
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002564- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2565 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2566
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002567- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2568 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2569 and cannot be strings).
2570
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002571- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2572 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2573 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2574 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2575
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002576- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2577 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2578 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2579 Python itself.
2580
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002581- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2582 the referenced object, if it has one.
2583
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002584- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2585 the thread started at
2586 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2587
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002588- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2589 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2590 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2591 placed on a list index.
2592
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002593- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2594 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2595 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2596 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2597
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002598- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2599 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2600 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2601 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2602 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2603 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2604 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2605
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002606- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2607 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2608 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2609 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2610 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2611
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002612- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2613 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002614
2615- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2616 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2617 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2618 #693195.)
2619
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002620- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2621 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002622
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002623- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002624 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002625 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2626 interpreter executions, would fail.
2627
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002628- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002629 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002630 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002631
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002632Extension modules
2633-----------------
2634
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002635- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2636 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2637 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2638 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2639
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002640- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2641 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2642
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002643- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2644 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2645 and Greg Chapman.)
2646
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002647- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2648 recursively.
2649
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002650- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002651 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2652 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2653 leaks.
2654
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002655- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2656
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002657- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2658 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2659 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2660 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2661 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2662 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2663 #705836.
2664
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002665- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002666 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2667
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002668- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2669 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2670 See SF bug #692416.
2671
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002672- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2673 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2674
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002675- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2676 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2677 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002678
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002679- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002680 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2681 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2682
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002683- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2684 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2685 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2686 timeouts to work properly.
2687
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002688Library
2689-------
2690
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002691- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2692 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2693 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2694 future release.
2695
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002696- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2697 for querying platform dependent features.
2698
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002699- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002700
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002701- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2702 pickle protocol versions.
2703
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002704- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2705 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2706 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2707
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002708- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2709
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002710- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2711 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2712 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2713 modules.
2714
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002715- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2716 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2717 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2718
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002719- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2720 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2721
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002722- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2723 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2724 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2725
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002726- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002727 MS Office extensions.
2728
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002729- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2730 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2731
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002732- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2733 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2734
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002735- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2736 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2737 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2738 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2739 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2740 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2741
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002742- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2743 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2744 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002745
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002746- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2747 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2748 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2749
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002750- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2751
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002752- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2753 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2754 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2755
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002756Tools/Demos
2757-----------
2758
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002759- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2760 See the module docstring for details.
2761
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002762Build
2763-----
2764
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002765- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2766 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002767
2768C API
2769-----
2770
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002771- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2772
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002773- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2774 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2775 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2776
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002777- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2778 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002779
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002780 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2781 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2782 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002783
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002784- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002785 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2786
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002787- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2788 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2789 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002790
2791New platforms
2792-------------
2793
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002794None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002795
2796Tests
2797-----
2798
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002799- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2800 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002801
2802Windows
2803-------
2804
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002805- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2806 function.
2807
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002808- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2809 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002810
2811Mac
2812---
2813
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002814- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2815 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002816
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002817- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2818 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002819
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002820- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2821 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2822 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002823
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002824- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002825 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2826 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002827
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002828- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2829 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002830
2831
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002832What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2833=================================
2834
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002835*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002836
2837Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002838-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002839
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002840- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2841 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2842 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2843
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002844- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2845 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2846 (SF patch #664376.)
2847
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002848- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2849 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2850 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2851 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2852 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2853 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002854 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002855
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002856- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2857 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2858 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2859 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002860 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002861
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002862- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2863 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2864 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2865 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2866 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2867 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2868 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2869 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2870 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2871 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2872 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2873
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002874- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2875 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2876 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2877 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2878 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2879 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2880
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002881- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2882 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2883
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002884- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2885 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2886 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2887 case.)
2888
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002889- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2890 passed as unicode strings.
2891
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002892- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2893 See SF bug #683467.
2894
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002895- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2896 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2897
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002898- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2899
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002900- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2901
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002902- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2903 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2904 arguments.
2905
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002906- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2907 See SF bug #667147.
2908
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002909- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002910 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002911 See SF bug #676155.
2912
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002913- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002914 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002915 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2916 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2917 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2918 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2919 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2920 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002921
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002922Extension modules
2923-----------------
2924
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002925- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2926 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2927 tp_as_number pointer.
2928
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002929- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2930 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2931 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2932 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2933 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2934
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002935- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2936
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002937- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2938
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002939- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002940 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002941 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2942 patch #678531.)
2943
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002944- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2945 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2946
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002947- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2948 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2949
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002950- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2951
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002952- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2953 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2954 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2955
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002956- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2957
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002958- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2959 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2960
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002961- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002962
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002963- datetime changes:
2964
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002965 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2966
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002967 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2968 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2969 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2970 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2971 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2972 now.
2973
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002974 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002975 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2976 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002977
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002978 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002979 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002980 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2981 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2982 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2983 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002984
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002985 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2986 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2987 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002988 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2989
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002990 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2991 by a later example coded by Guido.
2992
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002993 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002994 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2995 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2996 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002997 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2998 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2999
3000 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3001 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3002 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3003 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3004 tzinfo subclass instance.
3005
3006 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3007 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3008 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3009 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3010 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3011 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3012 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3013 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003014
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003015 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3016 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3017 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3018 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3019 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003020 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3021
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003022 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003023
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003024 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3025 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3026 as a naive datetime object.
3027
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003028 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3029 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3030 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3031
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003032 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3033 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3034 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3035 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3036 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3037 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3038 comparison.
3039
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003040 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3041 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3042 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3043 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003044 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003045
3046 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003047
3048 and ::
3049
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003050 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3051
3052 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3053 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3054 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3055 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3056
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003057 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3058 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3059 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3060 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3061 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3062
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003063 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3064 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003065 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3066 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003067
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003068Library
3069-------
3070
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003071- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3072 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3073
3074- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3075 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3076 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3077 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3078 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3079 See PEP 307 for details.
3080
3081- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3082 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3083
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003084- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3085 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003086 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003087 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3088 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003089 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003090
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003091- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3092 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3093
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003094- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3095 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3096 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3097
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003098- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3099
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003100- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3101 exception.
3102
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003103- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3104 class.
3105
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003106- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3107 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3108 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3109
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003110- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3111 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3112
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003113- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003114 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3115 See SF bug #659228.
3116
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003117- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3118 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3119 See SF patch #651082.
3120
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003121- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003122
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003123- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3124 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3125
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003126- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003127 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003128
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003129- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3130 DOS paths from other platforms.
3131
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003132Tools/Demos
3133-----------
3134
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003135- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3136 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3137 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3138 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3139 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3140 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3141 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3142 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3143 example:
3144
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003145 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3146 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003147
3148 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3149
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003150
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003151Build
3152-----
3153
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003154- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3155 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3156 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003157 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3158
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003159 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3160
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003161- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3162 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3163 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3164 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3165 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3166 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3167 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3168 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3169 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3170
3171- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3172 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3173 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3174 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3175
3176- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3177 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3178
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003179C API
3180-----
3181
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003182- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3183 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003184
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003185- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3186 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3187 tp_as_number pointer.
3188
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003189- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3190 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3191 (SF #681367)
3192
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003193- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3194 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3195 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3196 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003197
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003198Tests
3199-----
3200
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003201- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003202 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3203 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3204 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3205 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3206 pydoc.)
3207
3208- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3209
3210- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003211
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003212Windows
3213-------
3214
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003215- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3216 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3217 time).
3218
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003219- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3220 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3221
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003222- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3223 release without strong cryptography.
3224
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003225- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003226 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003227
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003228- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3229 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3230
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003231Mac
3232---
3233
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003234- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3235 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003236
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003237- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3238 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3239 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003240
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003241- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3242 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003243
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003244- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3245 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3246 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3247 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003248
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003249- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003250 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3251 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3252 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003253
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003254
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003255What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003256=================================
3257
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003258*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003259
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003260Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003261--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003262
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003263- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3264
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003265- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3266 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003267 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003268 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003269 a different meaning than before.
3270
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003271- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003272 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003273 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003274
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003275- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003276 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003277 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003278
3279- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3280 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3281 and deallocation.
3282
3283- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3284 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3285
3286- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3287 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3288 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3289 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3290 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3291
3292- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3293 now detected by the garbage collector.
3294
3295- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3296 [SF bug 519621]
3297
3298- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3299 identifier.
3300
3301- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3302 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3303 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3304 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3305 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3306 [SF bug 563060]
3307
3308- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3309 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3310 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3311 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3312 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3313
3314- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3315 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3316 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3317
3318- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3319
3320- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3321 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3322 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3323 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3324 state of the slots would be lost.)
3325
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003326Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003327-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003328
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003329- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003330 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3331 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3332 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3333 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003334 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3335 Jython 2.1.
3336
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003337- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003338 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003339 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3340 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3341 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3342 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3343 these, see PEP 302.
3344
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003345- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3346 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3347 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3348
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003349- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3350 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3351 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3352
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003353- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3354 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3355 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3356
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003357- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3358 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3359 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3360 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3361 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3362 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3363 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3364 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3365 releases or implementations.
3366
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003367- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003368 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3369 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003370
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003371- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3372 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3373
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003374- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3375 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3376 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3377
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003378- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3379 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3380
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003381- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3382 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003383 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3384 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003385
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003386- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3387 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3388 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3389 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3390 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3391
3392 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3393 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3394 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3395 pattern.
3396
3397 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3398 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3399 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3400 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3401
3402 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3403 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3404 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3405 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3406 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3407 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3408
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003409- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3410 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3411 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3412 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3413 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3414 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3415 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3416 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003417
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003418- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3419 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3420 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3421 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3422 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003423 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3424 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3425 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3426 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3427 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3428 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3429 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003430
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003431- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3432 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3433
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003434- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3435 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3436 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3437 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3438 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3439 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3440 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3441 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3442 to Zack Weinberg!
3443
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003444- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3445 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3446 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3447 type. This has been fixed now.
3448
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003449- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3450 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3451 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3452
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003453- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3454 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3455 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3456 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3457 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3458 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3459 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3460 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003461 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003462
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003463- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3464 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3465 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003466
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003467- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3468 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3469 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3470 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3471 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3472 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3473 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3474 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003475 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003476 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3477 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3478
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003479- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3480 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3481 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3482 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3483 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3484 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3485 this.)
3486
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003487- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3488 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003489 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003490 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003491 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3492 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003493 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3494 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003495
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003496- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3497 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3498 currently running.
3499
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003500- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3501 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3502 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3503 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3504
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003505- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3506 as directory names.
3507
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003508- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3509 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3510
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003511- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3512 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3513
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003514- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003515 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3516 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003517
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003518- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3519 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3520 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3521 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3522 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3523
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003524- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3525 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3526 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3527 removed.
3528
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003529- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3530 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3531 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3532
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003533- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3534 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3535 to __debug__.
3536
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003537- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3538 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3539 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3540
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003541- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3542 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3543 deprecated now.
3544
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003545- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3546 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3547 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003548
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003549- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3550 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3551 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3552 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3553 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003554
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003555- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3556 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3557
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003558- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3559 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3560 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003561 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003562 is backward compatible.
3563
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003564- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3565 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3566 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3567 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3568 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3569
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003570- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3571 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3572 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3573 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3574 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3575 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003576
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003577- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3578 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3579
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003580- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3581 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3582
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003583- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3584 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3585 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3586 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3587 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3588
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003589- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3590 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3591 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3592
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003593- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003594 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3595
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003596- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3597 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3598 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003599
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003600- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3601 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3602
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003603- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3604 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3605 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3606
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003607- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3608
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003609Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003610-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003611
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003612- Added three operators to the operator module:
3613 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3614 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3615 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3616
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003617- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3618
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003619- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3620 archives.
3621
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003622- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3623 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3624 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3625
3626 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3627
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003628- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3629 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3630 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003631 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003632
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003633- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3634 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3635 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3636 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003637 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3638 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3639 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3640 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003641
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003642- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3643 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003644
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003645- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3646
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003647- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3648 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3649
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003650- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3651 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3652 supported.
3653
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003654- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3655
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003656- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3657 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003658
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003659- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3660 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3661
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003662- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3663
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003664- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3665 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3666
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003667- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3668 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3669 functions but callable type objects.
3670
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003671- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003672 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003673 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003674
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003675- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3676 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003677
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003678- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3679 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003680
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003681- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3682 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3683 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3684 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3685
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003686- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3687 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003688
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003689- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3690 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3691 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3692 and __imul__.
3693
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003694- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003695 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3696 is called.
3697
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003698- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3699 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3700 interpreter was compiled.
3701
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003702- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3703 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3704 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003705 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003706 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3707 1, not 2.
3708
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003709- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3710 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3711 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3712 limit.
3713
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003714- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3715 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3716 bug #623464.
3717
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003718- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3719 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3720 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3721 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3722
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003723Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003724-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003725
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003726- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3727
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003728- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3729 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3730 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3731 with Python 2.3a2.
3732
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003733- os.path exposes getctime.
3734
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003735- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003736 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003737 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003738 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003739 unit tests of floating point results.
3740
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003741- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3742 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3743 has been increased.
3744
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003745- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3746 executed.
3747
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003748- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3749 postinstallation script.
3750
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003751- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3752 test the current module.
3753
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003754- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003755 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3756 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3757 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3758 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3759
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003760- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003761 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003762 Ward's Optik package.
3763
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003764- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3765 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3766 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3767 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3768
3769- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3770 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003771 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003772
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003773- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3774 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3775 shelf are binary pickles.
3776
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003777- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3778 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3779
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003780- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3781 modules are iterators now.
3782
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003783- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3784 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3785 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3786 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3787 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3788 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003789
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003790- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3791 with their entity value.
3792
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003793- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3794
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003795- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3796 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003797
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003798- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3799 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003800 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003801
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003802- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3803 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3804 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3805 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3806 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3807 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3808 main():
3809
3810 import locale
3811 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3812
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003813- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3814 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3815
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003816- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3817 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3818 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3819 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3820 to the new standard.
3821
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003822- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3823 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3824 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3825 an extension to the database.
3826
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003827- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3828 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3829 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3830 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003831 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003832
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003833- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003834 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003835
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003836- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3837 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3838 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3839 bounded integers.
3840
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003841- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3842 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3843 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3844 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3845 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3846 in existence.
3847
3848 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3849 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3850 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3851 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3852 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3853 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3854
3855 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3856 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3857 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3858 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3859
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003860- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3861 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3862 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3863
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003864- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3865
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003866- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3867 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3868 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3869 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3870
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003871- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3872 argument.
3873
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003874- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3875 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3876 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3877 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3878 [SF patch 560794].
3879
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003880- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3881 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3882 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003883 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3884 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3885 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003886
3887- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3888 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003889
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003890- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3891 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3892 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3893 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003894
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003895- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3896 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3897 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3898 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3899 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3900
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003901- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003902
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003903- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3904
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003905- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3906 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3907 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3908 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3909 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3910 identical to None.
3911
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003912- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3913 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3914 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3915 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3916 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3917 results now.
3918
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003919- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3920 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3921
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003922- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3923 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3924 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3925 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3926 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3927 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3928 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3929 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3930
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003931- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3932
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003933- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3934 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3935
3936- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3937 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3938 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3939 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3940 and other systems.
3941
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003942- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3943 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3944 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3945 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 +00003946 work well with these.
3947
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003948- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3949
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003950- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003951 connections.
3952
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003953- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3954 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3955 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3956
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003957- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3958 sets
3959
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003960- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3961 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3962 name.
3963
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003964- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3965 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3966 passed in.
3967
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003968- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003969 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003970 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3971 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003972
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003973- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3974
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003975- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3976
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003977- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3978 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3979 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3980
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003981- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3982 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3983 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3984 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003985 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003986
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003987- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003988 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003989 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003990
3991- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3992 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3993 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3994
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003995- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003996 the value of its expression argument.
3997
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003998- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3999 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4000 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4001
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004002- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4003 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4004 skipstone browser was included.
4005
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004006- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4007 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4008
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004009Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004010-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004011
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004012- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4013 names in addition to accepting file names.
4014
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004015- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4016 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4017 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4018 still used and useful.)
4019
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004020- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4021 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4022 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4023 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004024
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004025- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4026 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4027 the generated binary.
4028
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004029Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004030-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004031
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004032- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4033
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004034- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4035 except in the hands of experts.
4036
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004037- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004038 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4039 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4040 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004041
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004042- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4043 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4044 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4045 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4046 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4047 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4048 builds.
4049
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004050- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4051 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4052 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4053 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4054 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4055 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4056 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4057 new type.
4058
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004059- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004060
4061 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4062 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4063 positive infinities.
4064
4065 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4066 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4067 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4068 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4069 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4070 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4071 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4072
4073 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4074
4075 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4076
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004077- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4078 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4079 size of the executable.
4080
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004081- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4082 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4083 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4084 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004085
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004086- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4087
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004088- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4089 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4090 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004091
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004092- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4093 well as Unix.
4094
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004095- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4096 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4097 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4098 modules in the README file for details.
4099
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004100C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004101-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004102
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004103- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4104 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004105 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004106 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004107 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004108
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004109- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4110 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4111 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4112 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4113 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4114 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004115 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004116 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4117 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4118 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4119 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4120 aligned.)
4121
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004122- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4123 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4124 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4125
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004126- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4127 level.
4128
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004129- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4130 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4131 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4132 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4133 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4134
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004135- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4136 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4137 code.
4138
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004139- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4140 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4141 adjusting for negative indices.
4142
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004143- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4144 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4145 object.
4146
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004147- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4148 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4149 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4150
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004151- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4152 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004153
4154- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4155
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004156- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4157 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4158 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4159 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4160
4161- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4162
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004163- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004164
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004165- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004166 without going through the buffer API.
4167
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004168- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004169
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004170- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4171 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4172 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4173 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4174
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004175- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4176 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4177
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004178- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004179 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4180
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004181New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004182-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004183
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004184- OpenVMS is now supported.
4185
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004186- AtheOS is now supported.
4187
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004188- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4189
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004190- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4191
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004192Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004193-----
4194
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004195- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4196 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4197 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004198
4199Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004200-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004201
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004202- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4203 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4204 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4205 bugs.
4206 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004207 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004208 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4209 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004210 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004211
4212- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004213 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004214
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004215- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4216 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4217
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004218- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4219 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004220 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004221 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4222
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004223- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4224 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4225 use files" uninstall option).
4226
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004227- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4228
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004229- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4230 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4231
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004232- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4233 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4234 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4235
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004236- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4237 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4238 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4239 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4240 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004241 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4242 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4243 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004244
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004245- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004246 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004247 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4248 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4249 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4250 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4251 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4252 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4253 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4254 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4255 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4256 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4257 work around.
4258
4259- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4260 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4261 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4262 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4263 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4264 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4265 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4266 specified with O_CREAT too).
4267
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004268Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004269----
4270
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004271- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004272
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004273- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4274 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4275 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4276
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004277- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4278 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4279 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4280
4281- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4282 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4283 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4284 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4285 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4286 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4287 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4288 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004289
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004290- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4291 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4292 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004293
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004294- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4295 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4296 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4297 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4298 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004299
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004300- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4301 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4302 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004303
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004304- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4305 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004306
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004307- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4308 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4309 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4310 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4311 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004312
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004313- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4314 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4315 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4316
4317- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4318 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4319 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004320
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004321- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4322 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4323 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4324 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004325 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004326
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004327- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4328 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004329
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004330- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4331 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004332
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004333- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004334 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004335 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4336 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004337
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004338
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004339What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004340===============================
4341
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004342*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4343
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004344Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004345--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004346
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004347- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4348 with a custom metaclass.
4349
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004350Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004351-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004352
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004353- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4354 are proxies.
4355
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004356Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004357-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004358
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004359- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4360 very short strings.
4361
4362- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4363 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4364 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4365 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4366 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4367
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004368Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004369-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004370
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004371- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4372 close or delete time).
4373
4374- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4375 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4376
4377- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4378
4379- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004380 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004381
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004382Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004383-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004384
4385Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004386-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004387
4388C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004389-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004390
4391New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004392-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004393
4394Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004395-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004396
4397Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004398-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004399
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004400- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4401
4402- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4403 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4404
4405- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4406 deleted at process exit time.
4407
4408- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4409 in backslash.
4410
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004411Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004412----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004413
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004414- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4415 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4416 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4417
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004418
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004419What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004420===========================
4421
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004422*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4423
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004424Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004425--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004426
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004427- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4428 been extensively updated. See
4429
4430 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4431
4432 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4433
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004434- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4435 deleted!
4436
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004437- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4438 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4439 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4440 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4441 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4442
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004443- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4444
4445 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4446 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4447
4448 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4449 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4450 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4451 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4452 supported anyway.
4453
4454 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4455 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4456
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004457- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4458 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4459 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4460 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4461 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004462
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004463- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4464 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4465 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4466
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004467Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004468-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004469
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004470- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4471 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4472 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4473 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4474 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4475 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004476 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4477 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4478 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4479 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004480
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004481- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4482 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4483 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4484
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004485Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004486-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004487
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004488- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4489
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004490Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004491-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004492
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004493- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4494 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4495 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4496 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4497 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4498 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4499
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004500- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4501
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004502- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4503
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004504- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4505
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004506- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4507 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4508 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4509
4510- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4511
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004512Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004513-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004514
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004515- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4516 off a search on Google.
4517
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004518Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004519-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004520
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004521- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4522 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4523 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4524 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4525 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4526 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4527 other platforms should do likewise.
4528
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004529- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4530 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4531 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4532
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004533C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004534-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004535
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004536- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4537 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4538 producing key-value pairs.
4539
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004540- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004541 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004542 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4543 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4544 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4545 previously went unchallenged.
4546
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004547New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004548-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004549
4550Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004551-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004552
4553Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004554-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004555
4556Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004557----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004558
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004559- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4560 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004561
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004562- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4563 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4564 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4565 home.
4566
4567
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004568What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004569===========================
4570
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004571*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4572
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004573Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004574--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004575
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004576- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4577 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004578
4579 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004580 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004581
4582 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4583 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004584 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004585 This needs to be documented.
4586
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004587- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4588 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4589
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004590- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4591 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4592 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4593
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004594- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4595 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4596
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004597- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4598 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4599 class forbids it).
4600
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004601- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4602 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4603 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4604
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004605- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4606
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004607Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004608-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004609
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004610- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4611 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004612 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004613
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004614- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4615 (like 1 + '').
4616
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004617Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004618-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004619
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004620- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4621 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4622 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4623 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004624 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004625 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4626
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004627- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4628 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4629 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4630 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4631
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004632- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4633 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004634 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4635 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4636 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004637
4638- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4639 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004640
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004641- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4642 bytes on its input.
4643
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004644Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004645-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004646
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004647- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004648 convenience function.
4649
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004650- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4651 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4652 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004653 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4654 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4655 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4656 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4657 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4658 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004659
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004660- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4661 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4662 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4663 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4664
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004665- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4666 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4667 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4668
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004669- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4670 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4671 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4672 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4673
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004674- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4675 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004676 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004677 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4678 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4679 new -l and -e options.
4680
4681- statcache is now deprecated.
4682
4683- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4684 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004685 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004686 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4687 time properly taken into account.
4688
4689- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4690 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4691 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4692 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4693
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004694Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004695-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004696
4697Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004698-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004699
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004700- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4701 is built with libdb3 if available.
4702
4703- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4704
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004705C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004706-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004707
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004708- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4709 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4710 PySequence_Size().
4711
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004712- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4713
4714- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4715 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4716 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4717
4718- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4719 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4720
4721- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4722 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4723
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004724New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004725-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004726
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004727- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4728 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4729
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004730- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4731 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4732
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004733- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4734
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004735Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004736-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004737
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004738- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4739 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4740
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004741Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004742-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004743
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004744Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004745----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004746
4747- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4748 removed completely in the next release.
4749
4750- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4751 OSX.
4752
4753- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4754 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4755
4756- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4757
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004758
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004759What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004760===========================
4761
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004762*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4763
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004764Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004765--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004766
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004767- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004768 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004769 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004770 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4771 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004772 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4773 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004774 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4775 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004776
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004777- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4778 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4779
4780- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4781 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4782
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004783Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004784-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004785
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004786- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4787 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4788 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4789 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4790 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4791 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4792 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4793 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4794
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004795- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4796 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4797 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4798 example).
4799
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004800- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004801 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004802 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004803 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004804
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004805- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4806 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4807 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004808 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004809
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004810- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4811 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4812 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4813 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4814 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4815 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4816
4817 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4818
4819 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4820
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004821Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004822-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004823
4824- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4825
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004826- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4827
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004828- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4829 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004830
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004831- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4832 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4833 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4834 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4835 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4836 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004837 attributes.
4838
4839- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4840 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4841 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004842
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004843- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4844 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4845 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004846
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004847- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4848 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4849 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004850 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4851 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4852
4853- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4854 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004855
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004856Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004857-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004858
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004859- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4860 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4861
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004862- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4863 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4864 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4865 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4866
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004867- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4868 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4869 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4870 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4871
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004872 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4873 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4874 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4875 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4876 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4877 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4878 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4879 without losing information).
4880
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004881- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004882 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4883 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4884 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4885 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4886 module).
4887
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004888 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004889 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4890 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4891 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4892 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004893
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004894- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004895 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4896 encoding.
4897
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004898- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4899 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4900
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004901- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004902 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4903
4904- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4905 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4906 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4907 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4908
4909- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4910
4911- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4912 ON, and OFF.
4913
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004914- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4915 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4916
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004917Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004918-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004919
4920- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4921 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4922 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004923
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004924- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4925 been added: -X and -E.
4926
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004927Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004928-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004929
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004930- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4931 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4932
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004933C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004934-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004935
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004936- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4937 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4938 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4939 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4940 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4941
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004942- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4943 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4944 as long) arguments.
4945
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004946- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4947 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4948 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4949 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4950 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4951 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4952
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004953- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4954 input.
4955
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004956New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004957-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004958
4959Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004960-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004961
4962Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004963-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004964
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004965- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4966 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4967 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4968
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004969- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4970 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4971 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004972 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004973
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004974 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4975 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4976 import signal
4977 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004978
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004979 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004980 while 1:
4981 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004982 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004983 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4984 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4985 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4986 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004987
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004988
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004989What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4990===========================
4991
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004992*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4993
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004994Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004995--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004996
4997- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4998 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4999 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5000
5001- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5002 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5003 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5004 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5005 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5006 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5007 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005008
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005009- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005010 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005011 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5012 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5013 associate a docstring with a property.
5014
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005015- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5016 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5017 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5018 other built-in object types.
5019
5020- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5021 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5022 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5023 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5024 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5025
5026- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5027 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5028
5029- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5030 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005031 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005032 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5033 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5034 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5035 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5036 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5037
5038- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5039 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5040 class.
5041
5042- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5043 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5044 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5045 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5046
5047- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5048 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5049 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5050 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5051
5052- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5053 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5054
5055- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5056 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5057 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5058 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5059 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005060 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005061 with the same value as s.
5062
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005063- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5064
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005065Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005066----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005067
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005068- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5069
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005070- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5071 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5072 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5073 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5074 objects.
5075
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005076- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5077 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005078 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5079 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5080
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005081- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5082 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5083 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5084
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005085Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005086-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005087
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005088- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5089 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5090 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5091 by the instances.
5092
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005093- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5094 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5095 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5096
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005097- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5098 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5099 before the entire comparison is complete.
5100
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005101- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5102 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5103 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5104
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005105- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5106 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5107 getwriter().
5108
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005109- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5110 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5111
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005112- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005113 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5114 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5115
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005116- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5117 iterable object.
5118
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005119- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5120 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005121
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005122- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5123 authentication.
5124
5125- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5126 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005127
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005128- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005129 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5130 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5131 a sample driver.)
5132
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005133Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005134-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005135
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005136- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5137 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5138 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5139 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5140 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5141 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5142 kernel has large file support.
5143
5144- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5145 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5146 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5147 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5148 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5149
5150- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5151 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5152 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5153
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005154C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005155-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005156
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005157- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5158 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5159
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005160New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005161-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005162
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005163- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5164 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5165
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005166Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005167-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005168
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005169- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5170 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5171 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5172 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5173 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5174
5175- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5176 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5177 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5178 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5179
5180- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5181 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5182
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005183Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005184-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005185
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005186- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005187 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5188 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005189
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005190
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005191What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5192===========================
5193
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005194*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5195
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005196Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005197----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005198
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005199- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5200 big to represent as a C double.
5201
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005202- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5203 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5204 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5205 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5206 restriction).
5207
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005208- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5209 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5210 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5211 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5212 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5213
5214 >>> dir([])
5215 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5216 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5217 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5218 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5219 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5220 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5221 'reverse', 'sort']
5222
5223 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5224
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005225- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005226 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5227 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5228 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5229 OverflowError exception.
5230
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005231- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005232 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005233 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5234 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5235 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5236 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5237 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005238 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005239 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5240 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5241
5242 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5243 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5244 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5245 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005246
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005247- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005248 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5249 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5250 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5251 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5252 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5253 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5254 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5255 once it is created.
5256
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005257- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5258 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5259 (key, value) pairs.
5260
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005261- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005262 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5263 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5264
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005265- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5266 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5267 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5268 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5269 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005270
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005271- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005272 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5273 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5274
5275 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5276
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005277- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005278 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5279
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005280Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005281-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005282
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005283- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005284 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5285 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005286
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005287- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5288 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5289 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5290 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5291 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5292 in this area anymore).
5293
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005294- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5295 threading.Timer.
5296
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005297- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5298 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5299
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005300- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005301 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5302
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005303- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005304 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5305 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5306 converted to Python longs.
5307
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005308- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005309 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5310
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005311- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5312 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5313 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5314
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005315Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005316-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005317
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005318- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5319 division operators as per PEP 238.
5320
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005321Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005322-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005323
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005324- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5325 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5326 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5327 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5328
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005329C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005330-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005331
5332- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005333
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005334- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5335 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005336 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005337
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005338 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5339 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005340 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005341 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005342
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005343- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005344 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5345 module:
5346
5347 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005348
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005349 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5350 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005351
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005352 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5353 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005354
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005355 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5356
5357 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5358
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005359- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005360 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5361 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5362 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005363
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005364New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005365-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005366
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005367- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5368 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5369 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5370 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5371 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005372
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005373Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005374-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005375
5376Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005377-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005378
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005379- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5380 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5381 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5382 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005383 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5384 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5385 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5386 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5387 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005388
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005389- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005390 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5391
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005392
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005393What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5394===========================
5395
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005396*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5397
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005398Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005399-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005400
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005401- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5402 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5403
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005404- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5405 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5406 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005407
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005408- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5409 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5410 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5411 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005412
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005413- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5414
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005415- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005416
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005417Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005418-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005419
5420- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005421 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005422 the module docstring for details.
5423
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005424Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005425-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005426
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005427- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005428 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5429 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5430 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005431
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005432- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5433 Nick Mathewson.
5434
5435Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005436----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005437
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005438- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5439 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5440 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5441 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5442 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5443 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5444 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5445 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5446
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005447- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5448 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5449 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5450 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5451
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005452- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5453 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5454 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5455 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5456 come a long way).
5457
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005458- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5459 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5460 write filters for these warnings).
5461
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005462- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5463 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5464 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5465 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5466 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5467
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005468- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5469 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5470 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5471 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5472 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5473 older distribution.
5474
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005475Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005476-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005477
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005478- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5479 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005480 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005481
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005482- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5483 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5484 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5485
5486- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5487
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005488- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5489
5490- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5491
5492- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5493
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005494- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005495
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005496- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5497
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005498New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005499-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005500
5501C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005502-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005503
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005504- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5505 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5506 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5507 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5508 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5509 against buffer overruns.
5510
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005511- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005512 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5513 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005514 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5515 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5516 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5517
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005518- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5519 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5520 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5521 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5522 deprecated.
5523
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005524Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005525-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005526
5527- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5528 relevant is found.
5529
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005530
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005531What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005532===========================
5533
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005534*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5535
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005536Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005537----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005538
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005539- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5540 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5541 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5542 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5543 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5544 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5545 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5546 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005547 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005548 repaired.
5549
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005550- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005551 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005552 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5553 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5554 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5555 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5556 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5557 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5558 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5559 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5560
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005561- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5562 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5563 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5564 leading BMO character).
5565
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005566- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5567 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5568 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5569
5570 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5571 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5572 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005573
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005574 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5575 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5576 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5577 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5578 for various simple to use conversions.
5579
5580 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5581 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5582
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005583 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5584 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5585 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5586 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5587 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5588 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5589 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5590 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5591 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5592 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5593 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5594 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5595 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5596 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5597 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005598
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005599- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5600 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5601 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005602 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005603 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005604
5605 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005606 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5607 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5608 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5609 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5610 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005611 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5612 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005613
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005614 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5615 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5616 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005617 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005618
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005619- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5620 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5621 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5622 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5623 floating arithmetic,
5624
5625 x = 9007199254740992.0
5626 print long(x)
5627
5628 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5629 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5630 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5631 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5632 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5633 functions are of good quality).
5634
5635 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5636 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5637 algorithms to break.
5638
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005639- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5640 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5641 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5642 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5643 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5644 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5645 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5646 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5647 order.
5648
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005649- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5650 operation along the most common code paths.
5651
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005652- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5653 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5654
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005655- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5656 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5657 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5658 {}.update(UserDict())
5659
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005660- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5661 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5662 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5663 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5664 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5665 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5666 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5667 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5668
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005669- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005670 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005671
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005672 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005673 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5674 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005675 join() method of strings
5676 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005677 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5678 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005679 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005680 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005681
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005682- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5683 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5684
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005685- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5686 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5687
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005688- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5689 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5690 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5691 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5692
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005693- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5694 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005695 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005696 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5697 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005698
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005699- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5700
5701
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005702Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005703-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005704
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005705- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005706 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005707 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5708 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5709
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005710- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5711 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5712
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005713- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5714 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5715 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5716 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5717
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005718- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5719 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5720 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5721
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005722- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5723
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005724- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5725
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005726- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5727 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5728 that are still imported into string.py).
5729
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005730- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5731
5732- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5733 Now it does.
5734
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005735- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5736
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005737- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5738 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5739 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5740 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5741 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005742 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5743 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005744
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005745- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5746 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5747 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5748 'help(object)'.
5749
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005750Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005751-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005752
5753- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005754 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005755 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5756 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5757
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005758- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005759 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5760 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005761
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005762C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005763-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005764
5765- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5766 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005767
5768----
5769
5770**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**