blob: a3892fb1723b23312b6ff4e8856a08af54237968 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000015- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
16present).
17
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000018- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
19 codes.
20
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000021- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
22 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
23 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
24
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000025- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
26 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
27
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000028- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000029 (fixes bug #1119418).
30
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000031- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
32
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000033- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
34 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
35
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000036- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
37 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
38 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
39
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000040- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
41
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000042- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
43 reference counts in some error exit cases.
44
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000045- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
46 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
47 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
48 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
49 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
50 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
51 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
52 realloc.
53
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000054- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
55 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
56
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000057- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
58 like their int counterparts.
59
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000060- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
61 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
62 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
63 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
64 for a longer write-up of the problem).
65
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000066- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
67 serializing floats.
68
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000069- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
70 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
71 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
72
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000073- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
74 278.
75
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000076- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
77 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
78 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
79 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +000080 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000081 PyNumber_*().
82 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
83
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000084- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
85 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
86 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
87 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
88
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000089- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
90 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
91 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
92 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
93 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
94
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000095- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
96 disabled caused a crash.
97
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000098- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
99 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
100
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000101- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000102 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
103
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000104- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
105
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000106- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000107 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
108 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
109 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000110
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000111- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
112
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000113- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
114 returning None.
115
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000116- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000117 ('\') with a specific error message.
118
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000119- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
120
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000121- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
122 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
123
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000124- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000125 an ferror() call.
126
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000127- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
128 list.sort().
129
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000130- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
131 (2+3) --> (5).
132
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000133- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
134
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000135- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
136 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000137
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000138- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
139 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
140 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
141
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000142- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
143 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
144 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
145
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000146Extension Modules
147-----------------
148
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000149- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
150
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000151- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
152
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000153- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
154 the file system encoding.
155
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000156- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
157 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000158
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000159- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
160
161- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000162 line without newlines.
163
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000164- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
165 on Windows.
166
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000167- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
168 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
169
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000170- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
171 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
172 for large or negative values.
173
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000174- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000175 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000176
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000177- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
178
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000179- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
180 if available on the platform.
181
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000182- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
183 available on the platform.
184
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000185- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
186 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
187
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000188- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
189
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000190- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
191 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
192 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
193
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000194- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
195
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000196- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
197 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
198
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000199- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000200 file size.
201
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000202- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
203
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000204- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
205 {remove_history,replace_history}
206
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000207- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
208 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000209
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000210- stat_float_times is now True.
211
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000212- array.array objects are now picklable.
213
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000214- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
215 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
216
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000217- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
218 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
219 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
220
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000221- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
222 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000223
224Library
225-------
226
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000227- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
228
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000229- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
230
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000231- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
232
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000233- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
234 functionality.
235
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000236- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
237
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000238- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
239 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
240
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000241- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
242 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
243 match the Content-Length header.
244
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000245- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
246
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000247- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
248 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
249 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
250
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000251- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
252
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000253- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
254
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000255- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
256 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
257
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000258- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
259 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
260 Tkdnd.
261
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000262- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
263 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
264
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000265- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
266 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
267
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000268- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000269 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
270
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000271- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
272 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
273
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000274- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
275 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
276
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000277- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000278 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000279
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000280- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
281
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000282- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
283 error messages.
284
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000285- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
286
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000287- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
288 Bug #1224621.
289
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000290- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
291 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
292 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
293 terminates by raising StopIteration.
294
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000295- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
296
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000297- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
298 component of the path.
299
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000300- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
301 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
302 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
303 class at all.
304
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000305- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
306 files to PyPI.
307
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000308- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
309 them to PyPI.
310
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000311- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
312 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
313 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
314 work as expected.
315
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000316- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
317 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
318
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000319- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000320 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
321
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000322- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
323
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000324- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
325 to build.
326
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000327- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
328 symbolic links on Windows.
329
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000330- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000331 profile.py if available.
332
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000333- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
334
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000335- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
336 in LWPCookieJar.
337
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000338- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
339
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000340- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
341
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000342- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
343
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000344- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
345
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000346- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
347
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000348- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
349
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000350- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
351
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000352- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
353
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000354- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
355 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
356 be exploited in various ways.
357
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000358- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
359
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000360- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
361
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000362- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
363
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000364- Enhancements to the csv module:
365
366 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000367 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000368 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000369 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
370 reporting.
371 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
372 dictates.
373 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000374 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000375 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000376 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
377 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000378 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
379 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000380 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000381 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
382 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
383 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
384 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
385 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
386 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
387 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
388 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
389 without first creating a dialect class.
390 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
391 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
392 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000393 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000394 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
395 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000396 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
397 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
398 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
399 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000400 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
401 This has been fixed.
402
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000403- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
404 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
405 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
406 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
407
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000408- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
409
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000410- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
411 (Bug #951915).
412
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000413- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
414 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
415 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000416 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000417
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000418- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
419
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000420- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
421 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
422
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000423- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
424
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000425- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
426
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000427- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
428
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000429- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
430
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000431- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
432
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000433- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
434 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
435 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
436
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000437- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000438 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000439
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000440- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
441 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
442 tokenizer with very long source lines.
443
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000444- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
445 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
446
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000447- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
448 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000449
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000450- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
451 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
452
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000453- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
454 correctly.
455
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000456- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
457 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
458 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
459 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
460 between two lines.
461
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000462- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
463 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
464 handlers.
465
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000466- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000467 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
468 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000469
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000470- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
471 considering it exactly like a '*'.
472
473
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000474Build
475-----
476
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000477- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
478 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
479
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000480- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
481 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
482
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000483- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
484 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
485 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000486 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000487
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000488- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
489 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
490 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
491
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000492- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
493
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000494- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
495 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
496
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000497- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
498 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
499 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
500 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
501 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
502 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
503 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
504 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
505
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000506- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
507 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
508 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
509 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
510
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000511
512C API
513-----
514
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000515- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
516
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000517- Removed PyRange_New().
518
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000519
520Tests
521-----
522
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000523- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000524
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000525
526Documentation
527-------------
528
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000529- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
530
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000531- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
532
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000533- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
534
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000535- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
536
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000537- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
538
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000539- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
540
541- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
542
543- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
544
545- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
546
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000547- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
548 Closes bug #1166582.
549
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000550- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
551 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
552 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
553
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000554Mac
555---
556
557
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000558New platforms
559-------------
560
561- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
562
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000563
564Tools/Demos
565-----------
566
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000567- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
568 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
569 source files that need an encoding declaration.
570 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
571
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000572- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
573
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000574- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000575
576
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000577What's New in Python 2.4 final?
578===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000579
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000580*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000581
582Core and builtins
583-----------------
584
585- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
586 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
587 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
588
589
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000590What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
591==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000592
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000593*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000594
595Core and builtins
596-----------------
597
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000598- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
599 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
600 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
601
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000602
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000603Library
604-------
605
606- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
607 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
608 raised is re-raised.
609
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000610- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
611 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
612
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000613- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
614 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
615 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
616 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
617 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
618 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
619 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
620 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
621 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
622 by the slice are recomputed now.
623
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000624- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000625
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000626Build
627-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000628
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000629- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
630 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
631 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000632
633C API
634-----
635
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000636- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
637
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000638
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000639What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
640================================
641
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000642*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000643
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000644License
645-------
646
647The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
648is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
649changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
650Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
651intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
652durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
653the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
654License::
655
656 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
657
658says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
659to Python 2.1.1.
660
661The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
662License Version 2.
663
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000664Core and builtins
665-----------------
666
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000667- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
668 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
669 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
670 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
671 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
672 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
673 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
674 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
675 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
676 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
677
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000678- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000679
680Extension Modules
681-----------------
682
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000683- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
684 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
685 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
686 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000687
688Library
689-------
690
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000691- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
692 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
693 returned.
694
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000695- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
696
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000697- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
698 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
699
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000700- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
701
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000702- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
703 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000704
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000705- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
706
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000707- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
708
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000709- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000710 the source code is updated and reloaded.
711
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000712Build
713-----
714
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000715- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000716
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000717What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
718================================
719
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000720*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000721
722Core and builtins
723-----------------
724
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000725- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000726 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
727
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000728- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
729 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
730 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
731 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
732
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000733- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
734 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
735
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000736- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
737 constant.
738
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000739- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
740 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
741 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
742 large), and to anomalies such as
743 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
744 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
745 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
746 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000747
748Extension modules
749-----------------
750
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000751- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
752 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000753 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
754 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
755 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000756
757Library
758-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000759
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000760- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000761 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000762 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
763 --swig-cpp.
764
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000765- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
766 it is set.
767
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000768- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000769
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000770- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
771 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
772 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
773 Closes bug #1039270.
774
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000775- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000776
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000777 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000778 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
779 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
780 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
781 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
782 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
783 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
784 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
785 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
786 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
787 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
788 + Updates to documentation.
789
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000790- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
791 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
792 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
793 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
794
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000795- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000796
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000797- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
798 applications should use the getmember function.
799
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000800- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
801
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000802- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
803 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
804 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
805 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
806 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
807 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
808 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
809 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
810 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
811
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000812- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
813 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000814 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000815
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000816- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
817 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
818 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
819 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
820 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
821 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
822 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
823 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000824
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000825- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
826 the new public features (of which there are many).
827
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000828- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000829 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
830 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
831 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
832 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000833 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000834
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000835- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
836
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000837- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
838 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
839 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
840 options.
841
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000842- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
843 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
844 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
845 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
846 conditions under which non-string values work.
847
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000848Build
849-----
850
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000851- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
852 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
853 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
854
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000855- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
856 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
857 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
858 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
859 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000860
861C API
862-----
863
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000864- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
865 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
866
867- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
868
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000869- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
870 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
871 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
872 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
873 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
874 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
875 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
876 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
877 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
878
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000879- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
880
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000881- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
882 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
883 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000884
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000885Tests
886-----
887
888- test__locale ported to unittest
889
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000890Mac
891---
892
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000893- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
894 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
895 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000896
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000897Tools/Demos
898-----------
899
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000900- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
901 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
902 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
903 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
904 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000905
906
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000907What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
908=================================
909
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000910*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000911
912Core and builtins
913-----------------
914
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000915- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000916 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
917
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000918- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
919 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
920 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
921 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
922 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
923 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
924 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
925 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000926 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
927 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
928 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
929 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
930 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000931
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000932- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
933 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
934 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
935 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
936 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
937
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000938- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
939
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000940- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
941 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
942
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000943- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
944 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
945 modified the list.
946
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000947- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
948 functions is now writable.
949
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000950- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
951 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
952 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
953 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
954
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000955- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
956 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
957 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
958 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
959 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000960
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000961- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
962 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
963
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000964Extension modules
965-----------------
966
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000967- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
968
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000969- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
970 data.
971
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000972- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
973 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
974 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
975 supposed to have been truncated away.
976
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000977- Added socket.socketpair().
978
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000979- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
980 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
981
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000982- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000983 versions of Python, have now been removed.
984
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000985Library
986-------
987
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000988- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000989 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000990
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000991- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
992 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
993
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000994- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
995 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
996
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000997- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
998
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000999- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1000 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001001
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001002- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1003 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1004
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001005- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1006
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001007- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1008
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001009- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1010
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001011- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1012 Percivall.
1013
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001014- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1015 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1016
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001017- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1018 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1019 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001020 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001021
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001022- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1023 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1024 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1025 and exponent.
1026
1027- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1028
1029- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001030 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001031 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1032
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001033- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1034 to the readline module.
1035
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001036- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001037 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1038 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001039
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001040- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1041 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1042 contains symlinks.
1043
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001044- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1045 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1046
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001047- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1048 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1049 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1050
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001051- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1052 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1053 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1054 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1055 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1056 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1057 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1058 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1059 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1060 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1061 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1062 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1063 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1064
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001065- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1066
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001067Tools/Demos
1068-----------
1069
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001070- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1071 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1072
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001073- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1074
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001075Build
1076-----
1077
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001078- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1079 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1080 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1081 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1082 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1083 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1084 plans to do so.
1085
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001086- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1087 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1088
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001089- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1090 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1091
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001092- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1093 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1094
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001095- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1096 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1097
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001098- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1099 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1100
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001101C API
1102-----
1103
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001104..
1105
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001106Documentation
1107-------------
1108
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001109- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1110 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1111
1112- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1113 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1114 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001115
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001116New platforms
1117-------------
1118
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001119- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1120
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001121Tests
1122-----
1123
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001124..
1125
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001126Windows
1127-------
1128
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001129- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1130 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1131 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1132 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1133 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1134 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1135 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1136 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1137 the problem.
1138
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001139Mac
1140---
1141
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001142..
1143
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001144
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001145What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1146=================================
1147
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001148*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001149
1150Core and builtins
1151-----------------
1152
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001153- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1154 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1155 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1156 sensitive code.
1157
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001158- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001159 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001160
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001161 @staticmethod
1162 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001163
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001164 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001165
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001166- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1167 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1168 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1169 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1170 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1171 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1172 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1173 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1174 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1175 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1176 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1177
1178 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1179 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1180 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1181 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1182 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1183 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1184 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1185
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001186- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1187 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1188
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001189- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001190 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001191
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001192- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001193 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001194 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1195
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001196- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001197 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1198 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1199
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001200- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1201 types that support garbage collection.
1202
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001203- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1204
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001205- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1206 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1207 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1208 Jython.
1209
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001210- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1211
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001212- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1213 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1214
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001215- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1216 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1217 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001218
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001219- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1220 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1221 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1222
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001223Extension modules
1224-----------------
1225
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001226- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1227
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001228Library
1229-------
1230
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001231- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1232 TIS-620
1233
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001234- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1235 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1236 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1237 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1238 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1239 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1240 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1241 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1242 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1243 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1244
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001245- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1246
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001247- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1248 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1249 same as when the argument is omitted).
1250 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1251
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001252- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1253
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001254- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1255 schemes are offered.
1256
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001257- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1258
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001259- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1260 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1261 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1262
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001263- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1264
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001265- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1266 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1267
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001268- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1269 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1270 when dummy_threading is being used.
1271
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001272- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1273 from a tarfile.
1274
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001275- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001276 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001277
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001278- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1279 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1280 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1281 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1282
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001283- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1284 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1285
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001286- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1287 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1288 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1289 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1290 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1291 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1292 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1293 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1294 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1295 by some other method in progress).
1296
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001297- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1298 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1299 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001300
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001301- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1302
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001303- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1304 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1305 AM Kuchling.
1306
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001307- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1308 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1309 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1310
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001311- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1312 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1313 instead of unsigned.
1314
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001315- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001316 no longer part of the public API.
1317
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001318- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1319 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1320 string methods of the same name).
1321
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001322- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001323 SF patch 945642.
1324
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001325- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1326
1327 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1328
1329 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1330 DocTestSuites.
1331
1332- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1333 that provide thread-local data.
1334
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001335- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1336 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1337
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001338- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1339
1340- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1341 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1342 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1343
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001344- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1345
1346 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1347 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1348 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001349
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001350 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1351 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1352 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1353 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1354
1355 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1356 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1357
1358 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1359 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1360 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1361 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1362
1363 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1364 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1365 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1366 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1367 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1368
1369 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1370 wrapping help output.
1371
1372 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1373 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1374 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001375
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001376C API
1377-----
1378
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001379- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1380 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1381 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1382 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1383 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1384 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1385 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1386 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1387 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1388 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1389 its visible semantics have not changed.
1390
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001391- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1392 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1393
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001394Documentation
1395-------------
1396
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001397- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001398
1399 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001400 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001401
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001402 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001403
1404 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1405
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001406- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001407
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001408Tests
1409-----
1410
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001411- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001412 platforms that use the Makefile.
1413
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001414- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1415 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1416 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1417
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001418
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001419What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1420=================================
1421
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001422*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001423
1424Core and builtins
1425-----------------
1426
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001427- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1428 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1429 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1430 objects now (one object instead of three).
1431
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001432- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1433 Windows DLLs.
1434
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001435- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1436 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001437
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001438- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1439 a new .pyc magic.
1440
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001441- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1442 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1443 be there.
1444
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001445- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1446 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1447 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1448
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001449- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1450 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1451 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1452
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001453- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1454
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001455- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1456 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1457 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001458
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001459- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1460 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1461
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001462- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1463
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001464- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001465 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001466
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001467- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1468
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001469- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1470
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001471- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1472 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1473
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001474- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1475 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1476 Fixes bug #858016 .
1477
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001478- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1479 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1480 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1481
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001482- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1483 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1484 improves their performance (about 35%).
1485
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001486- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1487 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1488 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1489
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001490- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1491 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1492 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1493 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1494
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001495- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1496 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001497 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001498 length is not known).
1499
1500- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1501 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001502 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1503 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001504 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1505
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001506- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1507 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1508
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001509- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1510 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1511 keyword arguments.
1512
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001513- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1514 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1515 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1516
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001517- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1518 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1519 cases.
1520
1521- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1522 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1523 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1524 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1525 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1526 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1527 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1528 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1529 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1530 a release build.
1531
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001532- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1533 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1534
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001535- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001536 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001537
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001538- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1539 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1540 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1541 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1542 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1543 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1544 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1545 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1546 destroyed.
1547
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001548- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1549 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1550 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1551 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1552 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1553 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1554 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1555 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1556
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001557- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1558 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1559 character other than a space.
1560
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001561- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1562 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1563 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1564 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1565 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1566 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1567 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1568 attributes with the same name.
1569
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001570- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1571 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1572 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1573 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1574 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1575 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1576 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1577 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1578 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1579 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1580 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1581 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1582 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1583 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001584
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001585- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1586 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1587 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1588 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1589 This has been repaired.
1590
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001591- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1592
1593- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1594
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001595- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1596 over a sequence.
1597
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001598- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001599 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001600
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001601- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1602
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001603- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1604 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1605 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1606 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1607 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1608 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1609 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1610 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1611
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001612- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1613 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1614 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1615
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001616- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1617 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1618 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1619 freelist.
1620
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001621- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1622 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1623
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001624- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1625 number.
1626
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001627- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1628 a TypeError exception.
1629
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001630- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1631 820195.
1632
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001633- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1634 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1635 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1636
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001637- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001638 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1639 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001640
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001641- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1642 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1643 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1644
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001645- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1646 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001647 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001648
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001649- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001650 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1651 the first call.
1652
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001653
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001654Extension modules
1655-----------------
1656
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001657- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1658 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1659
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001660- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1661 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1662 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1663 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1664 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1665 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1666 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001667
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001668- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1669
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001670- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1671
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001672- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1673 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1674
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001675- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1676 fewer false positives.
1677
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001678- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1679 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1680
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001681- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001682 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1683
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001684- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001685 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001686 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001687 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1688 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001689
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001690- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1691 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1692 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1693 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1694
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001695- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1696 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1697 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1698 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1699 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1700 #897625.
1701
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001702- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1703 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1704
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001705- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1706 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1707 and pops on either side of the deque.
1708
1709- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1710 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1711
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001712- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1713 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1714 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1715 other functions that expect a function argument.
1716
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001717- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1718
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001719- os.getsid was added.
1720
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001721- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1722 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1723 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1724
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001725- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1726
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001727- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1728
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001729- readline.clear_history was added.
1730
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001731- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1732
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001733- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1734
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001735- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1736
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001737- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1738
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001739- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1740
1741- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1742
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001743- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1744
1745- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1746
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001747- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1748 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1749 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1750
1751- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1752 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1753 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1754 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1755 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1756 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1757 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1758
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001759- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1760 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1761 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1762 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001763
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001764- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001765 iterators from a single iterable.
1766
1767- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1768 of raising a TypeError exception.
1769
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001770- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1771 as parameter.
1772
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001773Library
1774-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001775
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001776- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1777
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001778- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1779 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1780 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001781
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001782- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1783 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1784 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001785
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001786- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001787
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001788- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1789 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001790
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001791- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1792 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1793
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001794- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1795
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001796- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001797 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001798
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001799- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001800 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001801
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001802- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1803
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001804- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1805 on cygwin and mingw32.
1806
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001807- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1808
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001809- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1810 module.
1811
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001812- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1813 installation scheme for all platforms.
1814
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001815- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001816 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001817
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001818- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1819 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1820 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1821
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001822- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1823 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1824 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1825
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001826- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1827
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001828- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1829
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001830- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1831 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1832
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001833- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1834 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1835 type pattern with the same value exists.
1836
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001837- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1838 when run from the command prompt).
1839
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001840- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1841 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1842
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001843- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1844 default sort).
1845
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001846- Added global runctx function to profile module
1847
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001848- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1849
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001850- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1851
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001852- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1853
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001854- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001855 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1856 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1857 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1858 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1859 accordingly.
1860
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001861- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1862 decoding standards.
1863
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001864- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1865 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1866 called for all requests.
1867
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001868- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1869 they are passed to the compiler.
1870
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001871- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1872 indent, width and depth.
1873
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001874- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1875 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1876
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001877- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1878 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1879
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001880- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1881
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001882- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1883
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001884- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1885
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001886- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1887 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1888
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001889- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001890 for better performance.
1891
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001892- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001893
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001894- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1895 a string).
1896
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001897- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1898
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001899- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1900
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001901- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1902
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001903- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1904
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001905- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1906 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1907 list of fieldnames.
1908
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001909- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1910 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1911
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001912- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1913
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001914- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1915 empty lists.
1916
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001917- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1918 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1919 and shelves.
1920
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001921- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1922 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1923
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001924- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001925 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1926 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001927
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001928- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1929 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001930 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001931
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001932- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001933 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1934 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1935
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001936- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1937 and removed in Py2.4.
1938
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001939- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1940
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001941- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1942
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001943Tools/Demos
1944-----------
1945
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001946- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1947 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1948
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001949- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1950
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001951- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1952 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1953 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1954 destination in situations where both files are given.
1955
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001956- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1957 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1958 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1959 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1960
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001961- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1962
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001963- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1964 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1965 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1966 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1967 now.
1968
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001969- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1970 in effect
1971
1972- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1973 C-c C-h
1974
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001975- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1976 -d option was given.
1977
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001978Build
1979-----
1980
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001981- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1982 build under OS X.
1983
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001984- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1985 --enable-profiling.
1986
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001987- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1988 is configured --with-tsc.
1989
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001990- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1991 on AMD64.
1992
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001993- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1994 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1995
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001996- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1997 removed.
1998
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001999- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2000 supported (see PEP 11).
2001
2002- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2003
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002004- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2005
2006- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2007 (see PEP 11).
2008
2009- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2010 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2011
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002012C API
2013-----
2014
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002015- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2016 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2017 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2018
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002019- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2020 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2021 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2022 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2023
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002024- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2025 generator objects.
2026
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002027- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2028 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002029 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2030 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002031
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002032- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2033 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2034
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002035- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2036 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2037 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2038 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2039 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2040
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002041- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2042 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2043 about 10% faster.
2044
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002045- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2046 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2047
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002048- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2049 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2050 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2051 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2052
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002053Windows
2054-------
2055
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002056- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2057 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2058 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2059 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2060
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002061- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2062 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2063 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2064
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002065
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002066What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2067===============================
2068
2069*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2070
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002071IDLE
2072----
2073
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002074- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2075 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2076 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2077 context-menu actions.
2078
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002079- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2080 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2081 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2082 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2083 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2084 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2085 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2086 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2087 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2088
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002089
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002090What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2091=============================================
2092
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002093*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002094
2095Core and builtins
2096-----------------
2097
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002098- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002099 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002100 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2101
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002102Extension modules
2103-----------------
2104
2105- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2106 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2107 than once. This has been fixed.
2108
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002109- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2110 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2111 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2112 call.
2113
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002114- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2115
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002116Library
2117-------
2118
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002119- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2120 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2121
2122- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2123 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2124 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2125 restored.
2126
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002127IDLE
2128----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002129
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002130- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002131
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002132Build
2133-----
2134
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002135- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2136 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2137
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002138C API
2139-----
2140
2141Windows
2142-------
2143
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002144- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2145 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2146
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002147- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2148
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002149Mac
2150---
2151
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002152- Various fixes to pimp.
2153
2154- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2155
2156- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2157 more problems than it solves.
2158
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002159
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002160What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2161=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002162
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002163*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2164
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002165Core and builtins
2166-----------------
2167
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002168- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2169 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2170
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002171- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2172 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002173 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002174
2175- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2176 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2177 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002178 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002179
2180- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2181 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002182
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002183- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2184 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2185 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2186
2187- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002188 770247.
2189
2190- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002191
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002192Extension modules
2193-----------------
2194
2195- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2196 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2197
2198- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2199
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002200- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2201
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002202- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2203 contained within the _strptime module.
2204
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002205- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2206 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2207
2208- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002209 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2210
2211- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2212 the find_class attribute, if present.
2213
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002214- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002215
2216 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2217 (SF bug 763298).
2218
2219 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002220 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2221 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2222 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002223
2224 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2225
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002226Library
2227-------
2228
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002229- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2230
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002231- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2232 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2233 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2234 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2235 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2236 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2237 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2238 or Tester().
2239
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002240- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2241 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2242 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2243 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2244 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2245 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2246 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2247 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2248 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002249
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002250 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002251
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002252- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2253 weren't before was an oversight.
2254
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002255- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2256 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2257
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002258- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2259 when there are no lines.
2260
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002261- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2262 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2263
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002264- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2265 to child processes.
2266
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002267- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2268
2269- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2270
2271- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2272 xmlrpclib.
2273
2274- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2275 responses.
2276
2277- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2278 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2279
2280- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2281 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2282 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2283
2284- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2285 used as patterns.
2286
2287- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2288 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2289 than Tk 8.3.
2290
2291- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2292
2293- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002294
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002295Tools/Demos
2296-----------
2297
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002298- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2299
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002300- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2301
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002302- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002303
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002304Build
2305-----
2306
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002307- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2308
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002309- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2310
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002311- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2312 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002313
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002314- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2315 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2316 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002317
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002318C API
2319-----
2320
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002321- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2322 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2323
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002324Windows
2325-------
2326
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002327- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2328 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2329 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2330 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2331 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2332 Python exception ::
2333
2334 thread.error: can't start new thread
2335
2336 is raised now.
2337
2338- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2339 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2340 instead of from DLL teardown.
2341
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002342Mac
2343---
2344
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002345- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002346 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002347 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2348 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2349 the executable in the bundle.
2350
2351- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002352
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002353- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2354
2355- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2356 on Panther.
2357
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002358What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2359================================
2360
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002361*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002362
2363Core and builtins
2364-----------------
2365
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002366- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2367 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2368 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2369 with the -i option.
2370
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002371- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2372 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2373
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002374- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2375 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2376
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002377- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2378 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2379 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2380 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2381 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2382 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2383 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2384 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2385 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2386 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2387 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2388 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2389 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002390
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002391- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2392 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2393 embedded in a lambda expression.
2394
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002395- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2396 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2397 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2398 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2399 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2400
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002401- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2402 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2403 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2404
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002405- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2406 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2407
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002408- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2409 It's writable again.
2410
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002411- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2412 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2413 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002414 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002415
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002416- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2417 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2418 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2419
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002420Extension modules
2421-----------------
2422
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002423- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2424 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2425
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002426- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2427 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2428 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2429 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2430
2431- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2432 collection.
2433
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002434- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2435 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2436 unique within a single program run.
2437
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002438- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2439 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2440
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002441- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2442 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2443
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002444- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2445 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002446
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002447- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2448
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002449- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2450 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2451
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002452- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2453 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2454 for many BSD-derived systems.
2455
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002456
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002457Library
2458-------
2459
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002460- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2461 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2462 primary ones:
2463
2464 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2465 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2466 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2467
2468 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2469 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2470 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2471 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2472 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2473 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2474
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002475- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2476 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2477 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2478 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2479 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2480 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2481 argument.
2482
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002483- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2484 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2485 in the archive.
2486
2487- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2488 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2489
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002490- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2491 569574).
2492
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002493- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2494 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2495 no more.
2496
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002497- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2498 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2499 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2500 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2501 code coverage.
2502
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002503- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2504 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2505 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002506 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2507 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002508
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002509- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2510 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2511 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002512 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002513
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002514- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2515
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002516- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2517 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2518 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2519 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2520
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002521- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2522 handling.
2523
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002524- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2525 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2526
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002527- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2528 in socket.py.
2529
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002530- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2531
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002532- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2533 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2534 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2535 opener with proxy support.
2536
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002537- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2538
2539- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2540
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002541Tools/Demos
2542-----------
2543
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002544- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2545
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002546- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2547
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002548- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2549 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002550
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002551- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2552 files.
2553
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002554Build
2555-----
2556
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002557- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002558 different root directory.
2559
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002560C API
2561-----
2562
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002563- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2564 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2565 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2566 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2567 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2568 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2569 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2570 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2571 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2572 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2573
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002574- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2575 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2576 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2577 from Python.
2578
2579
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002580New platforms
2581-------------
2582
2583None this time.
2584
2585Tests
2586-----
2587
2588- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2589 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2590
2591Windows
2592-------
2593
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002594- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2595
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002596- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2597 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2598 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2599 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2600 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2601 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2602 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2603 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2604 that's what it's for.
2605
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002606Mac
2607---
2608
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002609- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2610 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2611 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2612 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002613- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2614 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2615- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002616
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002617SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2618------------------------------------
2619
2620430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2621598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2622622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2623661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2624683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2625697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2626713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2627724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2628727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2629729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2630730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2631731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2632732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2633733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2634735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2635740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2636744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2637745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2638747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2639749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2640751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2641753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2642755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2643757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2644760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2645
2646
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002647What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2648================================
2649
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002650*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002651
2652Core and builtins
2653-----------------
2654
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002655- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2656 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2657
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002658- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2659 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2660 and cannot be strings).
2661
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002662- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2663 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2664 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2665 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2666
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002667- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2668 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2669 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2670 Python itself.
2671
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002672- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2673 the referenced object, if it has one.
2674
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002675- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2676 the thread started at
2677 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2678
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002679- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2680 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2681 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2682 placed on a list index.
2683
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002684- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2685 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2686 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2687 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2688
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002689- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2690 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2691 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2692 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2693 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2694 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2695 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2696
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002697- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2698 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2699 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2700 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2701 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2702
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002703- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2704 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002705
2706- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2707 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2708 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2709 #693195.)
2710
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002711- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2712 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002713
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002714- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002715 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002716 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2717 interpreter executions, would fail.
2718
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002719- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002720 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002721 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002722
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002723Extension modules
2724-----------------
2725
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002726- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2727 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2728 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2729 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2730
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002731- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2732 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2733
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002734- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2735 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2736 and Greg Chapman.)
2737
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002738- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2739 recursively.
2740
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002741- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002742 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2743 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2744 leaks.
2745
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002746- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2747
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002748- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2749 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2750 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2751 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2752 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2753 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2754 #705836.
2755
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002756- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002757 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2758
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002759- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2760 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2761 See SF bug #692416.
2762
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002763- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2764 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2765
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002766- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2767 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2768 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002769
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002770- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002771 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2772 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2773
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002774- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2775 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2776 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2777 timeouts to work properly.
2778
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002779Library
2780-------
2781
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002782- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2783 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2784 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2785 future release.
2786
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002787- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2788 for querying platform dependent features.
2789
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002790- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002791
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002792- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2793 pickle protocol versions.
2794
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002795- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2796 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2797 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2798
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002799- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2800
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002801- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2802 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2803 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2804 modules.
2805
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002806- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2807 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2808 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2809
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002810- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2811 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2812
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002813- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2814 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2815 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2816
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002817- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002818 MS Office extensions.
2819
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002820- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2821 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2822
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002823- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2824 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2825
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002826- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2827 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2828 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2829 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2830 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2831 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2832
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002833- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2834 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2835 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002836
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002837- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2838 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2839 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2840
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002841- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2842
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002843- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2844 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2845 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2846
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002847Tools/Demos
2848-----------
2849
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002850- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2851 See the module docstring for details.
2852
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002853Build
2854-----
2855
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002856- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2857 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002858
2859C API
2860-----
2861
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002862- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2863
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002864- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2865 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2866 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2867
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002868- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2869 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002870
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002871 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2872 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2873 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002874
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002875- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002876 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2877
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002878- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2879 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2880 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002881
2882New platforms
2883-------------
2884
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002885None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002886
2887Tests
2888-----
2889
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002890- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2891 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002892
2893Windows
2894-------
2895
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002896- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2897 function.
2898
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002899- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2900 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002901
2902Mac
2903---
2904
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002905- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2906 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002907
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002908- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2909 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002910
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002911- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2912 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2913 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002914
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002915- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002916 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2917 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002918
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002919- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2920 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002921
2922
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002923What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2924=================================
2925
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002926*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002927
2928Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002929-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002930
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002931- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2932 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2933 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2934
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002935- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2936 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2937 (SF patch #664376.)
2938
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002939- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2940 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2941 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2942 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2943 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2944 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002945 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002946
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002947- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2948 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2949 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2950 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002951 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002952
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002953- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2954 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2955 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2956 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2957 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2958 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2959 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2960 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2961 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2962 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2963 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2964
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002965- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2966 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2967 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2968 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2969 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2970 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2971
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002972- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2973 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2974
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002975- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2976 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2977 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2978 case.)
2979
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002980- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2981 passed as unicode strings.
2982
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002983- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2984 See SF bug #683467.
2985
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002986- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2987 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2988
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002989- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2990
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002991- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2992
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002993- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2994 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2995 arguments.
2996
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002997- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2998 See SF bug #667147.
2999
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003000- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003001 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003002 See SF bug #676155.
3003
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003004- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003005 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003006 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3007 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3008 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3009 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3010 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3011 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003012
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003013Extension modules
3014-----------------
3015
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003016- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3017 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3018 tp_as_number pointer.
3019
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003020- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3021 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3022 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3023 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3024 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3025
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003026- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3027
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003028- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3029
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003030- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003031 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003032 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3033 patch #678531.)
3034
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003035- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3036 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3037
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003038- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3039 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3040
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003041- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3042
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003043- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3044 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3045 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3046
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003047- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3048
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003049- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3050 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3051
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003052- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003053
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003054- datetime changes:
3055
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003056 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3057
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003058 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3059 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3060 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3061 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3062 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3063 now.
3064
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003065 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003066 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3067 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003068
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003069 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003070 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003071 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3072 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3073 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3074 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003075
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003076 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3077 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3078 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003079 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3080
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003081 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3082 by a later example coded by Guido.
3083
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003084 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003085 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3086 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3087 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003088 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3089 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3090
3091 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3092 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3093 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3094 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3095 tzinfo subclass instance.
3096
3097 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3098 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3099 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3100 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3101 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3102 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3103 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3104 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003105
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003106 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3107 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3108 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3109 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3110 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003111 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3112
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003113 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003114
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003115 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3116 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3117 as a naive datetime object.
3118
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003119 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3120 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3121 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3122
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003123 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3124 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3125 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3126 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3127 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3128 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3129 comparison.
3130
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003131 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3132 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3133 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3134 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003135 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003136
3137 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003138
3139 and ::
3140
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003141 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3142
3143 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3144 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3145 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3146 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3147
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003148 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3149 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3150 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3151 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3152 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3153
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003154 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3155 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003156 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3157 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003158
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003159Library
3160-------
3161
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003162- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3163 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3164
3165- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3166 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3167 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3168 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3169 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3170 See PEP 307 for details.
3171
3172- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3173 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3174
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003175- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3176 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003177 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003178 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3179 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003180 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003181
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003182- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3183 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3184
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003185- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3186 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3187 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3188
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003189- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3190
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003191- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3192 exception.
3193
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003194- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3195 class.
3196
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003197- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3198 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3199 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3200
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003201- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3202 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3203
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003204- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003205 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3206 See SF bug #659228.
3207
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003208- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3209 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3210 See SF patch #651082.
3211
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003212- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003213
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003214- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3215 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3216
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003217- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003218 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003219
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003220- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3221 DOS paths from other platforms.
3222
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003223Tools/Demos
3224-----------
3225
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003226- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3227 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3228 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3229 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3230 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3231 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3232 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3233 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3234 example:
3235
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003236 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3237 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003238
3239 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3240
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003241
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003242Build
3243-----
3244
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003245- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3246 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3247 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003248 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3249
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003250 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3251
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003252- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3253 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3254 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3255 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3256 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3257 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3258 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3259 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3260 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3261
3262- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3263 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3264 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3265 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3266
3267- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3268 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3269
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003270C API
3271-----
3272
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003273- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3274 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003275
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003276- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3277 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3278 tp_as_number pointer.
3279
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003280- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3281 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3282 (SF #681367)
3283
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003284- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3285 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3286 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3287 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003288
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003289Tests
3290-----
3291
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003292- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003293 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3294 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3295 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3296 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3297 pydoc.)
3298
3299- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3300
3301- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003302
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003303Windows
3304-------
3305
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003306- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3307 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3308 time).
3309
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003310- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3311 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3312
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003313- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3314 release without strong cryptography.
3315
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003316- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003317 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003318
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003319- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3320 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3321
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003322Mac
3323---
3324
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003325- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3326 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003327
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003328- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3329 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3330 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003331
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003332- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3333 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003334
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003335- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3336 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3337 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3338 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003339
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003340- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003341 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3342 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3343 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003344
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003345
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003346What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003347=================================
3348
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003349*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003350
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003351Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003352--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003353
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003354- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3355
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003356- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3357 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003358 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003359 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003360 a different meaning than before.
3361
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003362- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003363 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003364 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003365
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003366- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003367 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003368 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003369
3370- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3371 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3372 and deallocation.
3373
3374- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3375 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3376
3377- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3378 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3379 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3380 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3381 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3382
3383- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3384 now detected by the garbage collector.
3385
3386- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3387 [SF bug 519621]
3388
3389- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3390 identifier.
3391
3392- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3393 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3394 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3395 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3396 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3397 [SF bug 563060]
3398
3399- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3400 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3401 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3402 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3403 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3404
3405- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3406 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3407 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3408
3409- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3410
3411- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3412 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3413 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3414 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3415 state of the slots would be lost.)
3416
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003417Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003418-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003419
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003420- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003421 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3422 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3423 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3424 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003425 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3426 Jython 2.1.
3427
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003428- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003429 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003430 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3431 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3432 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3433 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3434 these, see PEP 302.
3435
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003436- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3437 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3438 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3439
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003440- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3441 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3442 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3443
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003444- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3445 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3446 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3447
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003448- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3449 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3450 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3451 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3452 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3453 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3454 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3455 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3456 releases or implementations.
3457
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003458- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003459 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3460 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003461
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003462- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3463 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3464
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003465- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3466 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3467 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3468
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003469- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3470 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3471
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003472- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3473 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003474 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3475 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003476
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003477- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3478 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3479 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3480 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3481 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3482
3483 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3484 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3485 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3486 pattern.
3487
3488 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3489 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3490 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3491 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3492
3493 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3494 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3495 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3496 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3497 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3498 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3499
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003500- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3501 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3502 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3503 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3504 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3505 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3506 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3507 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003508
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003509- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3510 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3511 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3512 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3513 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003514 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3515 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3516 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3517 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3518 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3519 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3520 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003521
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003522- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3523 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3524
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003525- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3526 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3527 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3528 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3529 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3530 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3531 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3532 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3533 to Zack Weinberg!
3534
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003535- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3536 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3537 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3538 type. This has been fixed now.
3539
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003540- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3541 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3542 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3543
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003544- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3545 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3546 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3547 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3548 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3549 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3550 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3551 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003552 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003553
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003554- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3555 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3556 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003557
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003558- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3559 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3560 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3561 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3562 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3563 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3564 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3565 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003566 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003567 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3568 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3569
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003570- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3571 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3572 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3573 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3574 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3575 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3576 this.)
3577
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003578- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3579 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003580 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003581 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003582 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3583 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003584 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3585 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003586
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003587- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3588 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3589 currently running.
3590
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003591- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3592 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3593 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3594 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3595
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003596- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3597 as directory names.
3598
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003599- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3600 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3601
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003602- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3603 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3604
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003605- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003606 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3607 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003608
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003609- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3610 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3611 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3612 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3613 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3614
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003615- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3616 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3617 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3618 removed.
3619
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003620- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3621 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3622 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3623
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003624- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3625 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3626 to __debug__.
3627
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003628- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3629 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3630 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3631
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003632- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3633 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3634 deprecated now.
3635
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003636- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3637 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3638 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003639
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003640- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3641 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3642 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3643 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3644 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003645
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003646- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3647 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3648
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003649- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3650 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3651 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003652 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003653 is backward compatible.
3654
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003655- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3656 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3657 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3658 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3659 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3660
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003661- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3662 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3663 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3664 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3665 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3666 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003667
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003668- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3669 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3670
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003671- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3672 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3673
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003674- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3675 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3676 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3677 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3678 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3679
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003680- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3681 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3682 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3683
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003684- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003685 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3686
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003687- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3688 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3689 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003690
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003691- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3692 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3693
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003694- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3695 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3696 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3697
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003698- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3699
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003700Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003701-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003702
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003703- Added three operators to the operator module:
3704 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3705 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3706 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3707
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003708- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3709
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003710- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3711 archives.
3712
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003713- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3714 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3715 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3716
3717 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3718
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003719- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3720 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3721 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003722 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003723
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003724- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3725 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3726 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3727 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003728 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3729 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3730 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3731 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003732
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003733- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3734 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003735
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003736- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3737
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003738- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3739 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3740
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003741- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3742 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3743 supported.
3744
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003745- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3746
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003747- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3748 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003749
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003750- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3751 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3752
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003753- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3754
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003755- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3756 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3757
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003758- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3759 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3760 functions but callable type objects.
3761
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003762- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003763 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003764 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003765
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003766- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3767 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003768
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003769- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3770 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003771
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003772- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3773 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3774 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3775 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3776
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003777- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3778 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003779
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003780- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3781 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3782 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3783 and __imul__.
3784
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003785- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003786 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3787 is called.
3788
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003789- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3790 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3791 interpreter was compiled.
3792
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003793- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3794 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3795 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003796 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003797 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3798 1, not 2.
3799
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003800- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3801 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3802 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3803 limit.
3804
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003805- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3806 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3807 bug #623464.
3808
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003809- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3810 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3811 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3812 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3813
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003814Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003815-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003816
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003817- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3818
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003819- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3820 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3821 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3822 with Python 2.3a2.
3823
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003824- os.path exposes getctime.
3825
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003826- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003827 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003828 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003829 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003830 unit tests of floating point results.
3831
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003832- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3833 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3834 has been increased.
3835
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003836- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3837 executed.
3838
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003839- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3840 postinstallation script.
3841
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003842- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3843 test the current module.
3844
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003845- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003846 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3847 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3848 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3849 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3850
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003851- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003852 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003853 Ward's Optik package.
3854
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003855- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3856 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3857 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3858 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3859
3860- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3861 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003862 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003863
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003864- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3865 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3866 shelf are binary pickles.
3867
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003868- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3869 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3870
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003871- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3872 modules are iterators now.
3873
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003874- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3875 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3876 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3877 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3878 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3879 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003880
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003881- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3882 with their entity value.
3883
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003884- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3885
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003886- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3887 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003888
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003889- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3890 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003891 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003892
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003893- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3894 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3895 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3896 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3897 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3898 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3899 main():
3900
3901 import locale
3902 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3903
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003904- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3905 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3906
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003907- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3908 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3909 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3910 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3911 to the new standard.
3912
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003913- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3914 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3915 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3916 an extension to the database.
3917
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003918- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3919 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3920 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3921 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003922 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003923
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003924- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003925 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003926
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003927- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3928 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3929 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3930 bounded integers.
3931
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003932- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3933 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3934 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3935 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3936 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3937 in existence.
3938
3939 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3940 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3941 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3942 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3943 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3944 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3945
3946 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3947 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3948 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3949 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3950
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003951- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3952 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3953 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3954
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003955- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3956
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003957- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3958 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3959 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3960 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3961
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003962- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3963 argument.
3964
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003965- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3966 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3967 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3968 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3969 [SF patch 560794].
3970
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003971- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3972 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3973 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003974 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3975 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3976 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003977
3978- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3979 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003980
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003981- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3982 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3983 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3984 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003985
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003986- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3987 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3988 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3989 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3990 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3991
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003992- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003993
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003994- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3995
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003996- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3997 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3998 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3999 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4000 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4001 identical to None.
4002
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004003- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4004 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4005 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4006 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4007 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4008 results now.
4009
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004010- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4011 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4012
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004013- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4014 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4015 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4016 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4017 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4018 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4019 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4020 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4021
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004022- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4023
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004024- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4025 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4026
4027- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4028 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4029 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4030 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4031 and other systems.
4032
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004033- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4034 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4035 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4036 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 +00004037 work well with these.
4038
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004039- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4040
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004041- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004042 connections.
4043
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004044- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4045 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4046 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4047
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004048- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4049 sets
4050
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004051- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4052 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4053 name.
4054
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004055- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4056 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4057 passed in.
4058
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004059- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004060 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004061 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4062 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004063
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004064- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4065
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004066- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4067
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004068- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4069 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4070 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4071
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004072- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4073 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4074 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4075 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004076 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004077
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004078- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004079 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004080 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004081
4082- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4083 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4084 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4085
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004086- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004087 the value of its expression argument.
4088
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004089- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4090 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4091 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4092
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004093- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4094 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4095 skipstone browser was included.
4096
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004097- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4098 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4099
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004100Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004101-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004102
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004103- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4104 names in addition to accepting file names.
4105
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004106- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4107 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4108 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4109 still used and useful.)
4110
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004111- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4112 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4113 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4114 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004115
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004116- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4117 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4118 the generated binary.
4119
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004120Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004121-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004122
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004123- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4124
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004125- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4126 except in the hands of experts.
4127
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004128- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004129 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4130 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4131 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004132
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004133- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4134 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4135 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4136 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4137 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4138 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4139 builds.
4140
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004141- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4142 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4143 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4144 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4145 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4146 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4147 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4148 new type.
4149
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004150- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004151
4152 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4153 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4154 positive infinities.
4155
4156 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4157 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4158 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4159 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4160 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4161 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4162 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4163
4164 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4165
4166 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4167
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004168- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4169 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4170 size of the executable.
4171
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004172- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4173 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4174 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4175 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004176
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004177- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4178
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004179- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4180 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4181 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004182
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004183- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4184 well as Unix.
4185
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004186- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4187 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4188 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4189 modules in the README file for details.
4190
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004191C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004192-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004193
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004194- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4195 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004196 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004197 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004198 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004199
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004200- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4201 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4202 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4203 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4204 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4205 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004206 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004207 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4208 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4209 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4210 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4211 aligned.)
4212
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004213- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4214 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4215 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4216
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004217- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4218 level.
4219
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004220- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4221 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4222 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4223 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4224 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4225
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004226- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4227 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4228 code.
4229
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004230- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4231 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4232 adjusting for negative indices.
4233
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004234- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4235 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4236 object.
4237
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004238- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4239 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4240 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4241
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004242- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4243 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004244
4245- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4246
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004247- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4248 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4249 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4250 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4251
4252- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4253
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004254- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004255
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004256- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004257 without going through the buffer API.
4258
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004259- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004260
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004261- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4262 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4263 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4264 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4265
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004266- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4267 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4268
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004269- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004270 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4271
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004272New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004273-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004274
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004275- OpenVMS is now supported.
4276
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004277- AtheOS is now supported.
4278
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004279- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4280
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004281- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4282
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004283Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004284-----
4285
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004286- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4287 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4288 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004289
4290Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004291-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004292
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004293- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4294 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4295 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4296 bugs.
4297 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004298 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004299 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4300 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004301 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004302
4303- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004304 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004305
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004306- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4307 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4308
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004309- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4310 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004311 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004312 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4313
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004314- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4315 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4316 use files" uninstall option).
4317
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004318- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4319
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004320- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4321 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4322
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004323- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4324 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4325 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4326
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004327- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4328 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4329 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4330 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4331 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004332 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4333 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4334 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004335
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004336- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004337 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004338 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4339 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4340 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4341 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4342 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4343 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4344 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4345 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4346 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4347 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4348 work around.
4349
4350- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4351 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4352 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4353 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4354 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4355 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4356 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4357 specified with O_CREAT too).
4358
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004359Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004360----
4361
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004362- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004363
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004364- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4365 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4366 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4367
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004368- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4369 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4370 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4371
4372- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4373 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4374 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4375 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4376 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4377 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4378 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4379 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004380
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004381- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4382 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4383 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004384
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004385- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4386 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4387 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4388 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4389 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004390
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004391- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4392 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4393 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004394
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004395- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4396 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004397
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004398- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4399 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4400 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4401 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4402 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004403
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004404- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4405 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4406 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4407
4408- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4409 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4410 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004411
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004412- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4413 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4414 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4415 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004416 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004417
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004418- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4419 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004420
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004421- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4422 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004423
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004424- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004425 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004426 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4427 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004428
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004429
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004430What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004431===============================
4432
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004433*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4434
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004435Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004436--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004437
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004438- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4439 with a custom metaclass.
4440
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004441Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004442-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004443
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004444- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4445 are proxies.
4446
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004447Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004448-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004449
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004450- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4451 very short strings.
4452
4453- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4454 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4455 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4456 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4457 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4458
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004459Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004460-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004461
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004462- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4463 close or delete time).
4464
4465- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4466 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4467
4468- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4469
4470- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004471 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004472
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004473Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004474-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004475
4476Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004477-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004478
4479C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004480-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004481
4482New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004483-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004484
4485Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004486-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004487
4488Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004489-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004490
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004491- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4492
4493- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4494 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4495
4496- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4497 deleted at process exit time.
4498
4499- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4500 in backslash.
4501
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004502Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004503----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004504
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004505- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4506 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4507 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4508
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004509
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004510What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004511===========================
4512
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004513*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4514
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004515Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004516--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004517
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004518- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4519 been extensively updated. See
4520
4521 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4522
4523 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4524
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004525- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4526 deleted!
4527
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004528- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4529 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4530 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4531 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4532 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4533
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004534- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4535
4536 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4537 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4538
4539 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4540 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4541 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4542 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4543 supported anyway.
4544
4545 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4546 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4547
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004548- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4549 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4550 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4551 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4552 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004553
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004554- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4555 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4556 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4557
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004558Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004559-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004560
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004561- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4562 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4563 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4564 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4565 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4566 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004567 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4568 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4569 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4570 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004571
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004572- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4573 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4574 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4575
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004576Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004577-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004578
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004579- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4580
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004581Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004582-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004583
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004584- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4585 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4586 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4587 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4588 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4589 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4590
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004591- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4592
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004593- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4594
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004595- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4596
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004597- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4598 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4599 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4600
4601- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4602
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004603Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004604-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004605
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004606- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4607 off a search on Google.
4608
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004609Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004610-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004611
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004612- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4613 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4614 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4615 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4616 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4617 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4618 other platforms should do likewise.
4619
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004620- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4621 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4622 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4623
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004624C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004625-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004626
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004627- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4628 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4629 producing key-value pairs.
4630
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004631- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004632 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004633 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4634 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4635 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4636 previously went unchallenged.
4637
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004638New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004639-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004640
4641Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004642-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004643
4644Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004645-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004646
4647Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004648----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004649
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004650- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4651 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004652
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004653- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4654 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4655 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4656 home.
4657
4658
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004659What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004660===========================
4661
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004662*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4663
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004664Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004665--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004666
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004667- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4668 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004669
4670 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004671 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004672
4673 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4674 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004675 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004676 This needs to be documented.
4677
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004678- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4679 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4680
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004681- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4682 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4683 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4684
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004685- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4686 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4687
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004688- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4689 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4690 class forbids it).
4691
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004692- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4693 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4694 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4695
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004696- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4697
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004698Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004699-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004700
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004701- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4702 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004703 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004704
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004705- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4706 (like 1 + '').
4707
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004708Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004709-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004710
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004711- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4712 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4713 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4714 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004715 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004716 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4717
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004718- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4719 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4720 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4721 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4722
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004723- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4724 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004725 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4726 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4727 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004728
4729- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4730 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004731
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004732- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4733 bytes on its input.
4734
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004735Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004736-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004737
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004738- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004739 convenience function.
4740
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004741- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4742 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4743 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004744 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4745 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4746 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4747 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4748 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4749 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004750
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004751- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4752 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4753 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4754 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4755
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004756- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4757 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4758 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4759
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004760- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4761 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4762 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4763 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4764
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004765- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4766 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004767 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004768 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4769 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4770 new -l and -e options.
4771
4772- statcache is now deprecated.
4773
4774- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4775 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004776 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004777 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4778 time properly taken into account.
4779
4780- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4781 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4782 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4783 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4784
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004785Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004786-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004787
4788Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004789-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004790
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004791- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4792 is built with libdb3 if available.
4793
4794- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4795
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004796C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004797-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004798
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004799- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4800 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4801 PySequence_Size().
4802
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004803- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4804
4805- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4806 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4807 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4808
4809- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4810 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4811
4812- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4813 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4814
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004815New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004816-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004817
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004818- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4819 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4820
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004821- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4822 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4823
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004824- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4825
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004826Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004827-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004828
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004829- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4830 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4831
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004832Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004833-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004834
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004835Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004836----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004837
4838- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4839 removed completely in the next release.
4840
4841- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4842 OSX.
4843
4844- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4845 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4846
4847- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4848
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004849
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004850What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004851===========================
4852
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004853*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4854
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004855Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004856--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004857
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004858- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004859 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004860 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004861 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4862 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004863 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4864 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004865 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4866 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004867
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004868- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4869 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4870
4871- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4872 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4873
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004874Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004875-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004876
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004877- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4878 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4879 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4880 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4881 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4882 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4883 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4884 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4885
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004886- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4887 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4888 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4889 example).
4890
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004891- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004892 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004893 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004894 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004895
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004896- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4897 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4898 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004899 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004900
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004901- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4902 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4903 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4904 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4905 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4906 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4907
4908 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4909
4910 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4911
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004912Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004913-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004914
4915- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4916
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004917- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4918
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004919- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4920 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004921
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004922- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4923 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4924 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4925 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4926 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4927 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004928 attributes.
4929
4930- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4931 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4932 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004933
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004934- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4935 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4936 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004937
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004938- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4939 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4940 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004941 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4942 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4943
4944- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4945 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004946
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004947Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004948-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004949
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004950- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4951 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4952
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004953- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4954 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4955 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4956 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4957
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004958- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4959 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4960 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4961 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4962
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004963 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4964 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4965 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4966 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4967 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4968 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4969 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4970 without losing information).
4971
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004972- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004973 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4974 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4975 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4976 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4977 module).
4978
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004979 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004980 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4981 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4982 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4983 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004984
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004985- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004986 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4987 encoding.
4988
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004989- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4990 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4991
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004992- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004993 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4994
4995- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4996 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4997 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4998 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4999
5000- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5001
5002- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5003 ON, and OFF.
5004
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005005- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5006 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5007
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005008Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005009-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005010
5011- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5012 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5013 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005014
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005015- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5016 been added: -X and -E.
5017
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005018Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005019-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005020
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005021- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5022 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5023
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005024C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005025-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005026
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005027- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5028 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5029 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5030 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5031 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5032
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005033- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5034 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5035 as long) arguments.
5036
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005037- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5038 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5039 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5040 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5041 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5042 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5043
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005044- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5045 input.
5046
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005047New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005048-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005049
5050Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005051-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005052
5053Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005054-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005055
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005056- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5057 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5058 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5059
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005060- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5061 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5062 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005063 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005064
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005065 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5066 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5067 import signal
5068 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005069
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005070 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005071 while 1:
5072 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005073 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005074 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5075 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5076 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5077 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005078
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005079
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005080What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5081===========================
5082
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005083*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5084
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005085Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005086--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005087
5088- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5089 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5090 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5091
5092- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5093 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5094 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5095 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5096 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5097 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5098 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005099
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005100- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005101 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005102 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5103 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5104 associate a docstring with a property.
5105
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005106- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5107 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5108 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5109 other built-in object types.
5110
5111- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5112 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5113 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5114 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5115 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5116
5117- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5118 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5119
5120- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5121 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005122 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005123 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5124 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5125 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5126 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5127 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5128
5129- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5130 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5131 class.
5132
5133- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5134 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5135 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5136 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5137
5138- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5139 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5140 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5141 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5142
5143- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5144 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5145
5146- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5147 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5148 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5149 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5150 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005151 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005152 with the same value as s.
5153
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005154- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5155
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005156Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005157----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005158
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005159- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5160
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005161- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5162 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5163 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5164 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5165 objects.
5166
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005167- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5168 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005169 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5170 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5171
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005172- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5173 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5174 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5175
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005176Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005177-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005178
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005179- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5180 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5181 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5182 by the instances.
5183
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005184- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5185 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5186 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5187
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005188- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5189 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5190 before the entire comparison is complete.
5191
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005192- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5193 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5194 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5195
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005196- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5197 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5198 getwriter().
5199
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005200- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5201 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5202
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005203- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005204 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5205 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5206
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005207- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5208 iterable object.
5209
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005210- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5211 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005212
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005213- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5214 authentication.
5215
5216- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5217 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005218
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005219- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005220 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5221 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5222 a sample driver.)
5223
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005224Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005225-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005226
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005227- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5228 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5229 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5230 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5231 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5232 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5233 kernel has large file support.
5234
5235- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5236 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5237 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5238 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5239 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5240
5241- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5242 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5243 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5244
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005245C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005246-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005247
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005248- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5249 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5250
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005251New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005252-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005253
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005254- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5255 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5256
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005257Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005258-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005259
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005260- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5261 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5262 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5263 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5264 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5265
5266- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5267 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5268 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5269 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5270
5271- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5272 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5273
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005274Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005275-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005276
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005277- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005278 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5279 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005280
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005281
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005282What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5283===========================
5284
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005285*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5286
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005287Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005288----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005289
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005290- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5291 big to represent as a C double.
5292
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005293- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5294 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5295 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5296 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5297 restriction).
5298
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005299- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5300 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5301 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5302 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5303 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5304
5305 >>> dir([])
5306 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5307 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5308 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5309 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5310 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5311 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5312 'reverse', 'sort']
5313
5314 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5315
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005316- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005317 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5318 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5319 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5320 OverflowError exception.
5321
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005322- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005323 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005324 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5325 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5326 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5327 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5328 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005329 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005330 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5331 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5332
5333 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5334 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5335 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5336 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005337
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005338- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005339 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5340 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5341 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5342 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5343 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5344 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5345 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5346 once it is created.
5347
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005348- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5349 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5350 (key, value) pairs.
5351
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005352- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005353 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5354 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5355
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005356- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5357 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5358 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5359 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5360 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005361
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005362- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005363 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5364 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5365
5366 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5367
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005368- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005369 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5370
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005371Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005372-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005373
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005374- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005375 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5376 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005377
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005378- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5379 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5380 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5381 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5382 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5383 in this area anymore).
5384
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005385- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5386 threading.Timer.
5387
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005388- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5389 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5390
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005391- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005392 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5393
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005394- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005395 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5396 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5397 converted to Python longs.
5398
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005399- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005400 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5401
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005402- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5403 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5404 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5405
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005406Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005407-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005408
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005409- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5410 division operators as per PEP 238.
5411
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005412Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005413-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005414
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005415- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5416 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5417 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5418 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5419
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005420C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005421-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005422
5423- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005424
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005425- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5426 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005427 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005428
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005429 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5430 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005431 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005432 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005433
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005434- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005435 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5436 module:
5437
5438 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005439
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005440 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5441 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005442
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005443 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5444 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005445
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005446 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5447
5448 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5449
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005450- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005451 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5452 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5453 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005454
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005455New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005456-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005457
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005458- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5459 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5460 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5461 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5462 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005463
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005464Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005465-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005466
5467Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005468-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005469
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005470- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5471 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5472 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5473 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005474 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5475 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5476 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5477 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5478 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005479
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005480- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005481 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5482
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005483
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005484What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5485===========================
5486
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005487*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5488
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005489Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005490-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005491
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005492- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5493 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5494
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005495- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5496 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5497 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005498
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005499- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5500 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5501 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5502 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005503
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005504- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5505
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005506- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005507
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005508Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005509-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005510
5511- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005512 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005513 the module docstring for details.
5514
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005515Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005516-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005517
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005518- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005519 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5520 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5521 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005522
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005523- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5524 Nick Mathewson.
5525
5526Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005527----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005528
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005529- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5530 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5531 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5532 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5533 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5534 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5535 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5536 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5537
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005538- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5539 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5540 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5541 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5542
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005543- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5544 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5545 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5546 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5547 come a long way).
5548
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005549- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5550 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5551 write filters for these warnings).
5552
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005553- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5554 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5555 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5556 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5557 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5558
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005559- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5560 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5561 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5562 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5563 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5564 older distribution.
5565
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005566Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005567-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005568
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005569- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5570 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005571 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005572
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005573- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5574 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5575 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5576
5577- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5578
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005579- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5580
5581- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5582
5583- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5584
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005585- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005586
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005587- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5588
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005589New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005590-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005591
5592C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005593-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005594
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005595- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5596 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5597 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5598 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5599 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5600 against buffer overruns.
5601
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005602- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005603 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5604 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005605 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5606 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5607 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5608
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005609- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5610 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5611 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5612 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5613 deprecated.
5614
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005615Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005616-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005617
5618- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5619 relevant is found.
5620
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005621
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005622What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005623===========================
5624
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005625*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5626
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005627Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005628----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005629
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005630- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5631 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5632 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5633 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5634 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5635 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5636 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5637 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005638 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005639 repaired.
5640
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005641- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005642 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005643 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5644 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5645 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5646 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5647 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5648 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5649 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5650 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5651
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005652- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5653 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5654 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5655 leading BMO character).
5656
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005657- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5658 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5659 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5660
5661 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5662 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5663 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005664
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005665 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5666 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5667 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5668 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5669 for various simple to use conversions.
5670
5671 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5672 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5673
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005674 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5675 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5676 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5677 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5678 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5679 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5680 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5681 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5682 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5683 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5684 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5685 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5686 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5687 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5688 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005689
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005690- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5691 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5692 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005693 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005694 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005695
5696 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005697 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5698 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5699 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5700 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5701 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005702 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5703 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005704
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005705 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5706 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5707 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005708 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005709
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005710- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5711 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5712 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5713 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5714 floating arithmetic,
5715
5716 x = 9007199254740992.0
5717 print long(x)
5718
5719 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5720 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5721 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5722 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5723 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5724 functions are of good quality).
5725
5726 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5727 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5728 algorithms to break.
5729
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005730- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5731 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5732 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5733 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5734 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5735 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5736 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5737 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5738 order.
5739
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005740- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5741 operation along the most common code paths.
5742
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005743- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5744 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5745
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005746- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5747 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5748 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5749 {}.update(UserDict())
5750
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005751- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5752 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5753 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5754 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5755 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5756 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5757 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5758 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5759
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005760- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005761 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005762
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005763 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005764 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5765 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005766 join() method of strings
5767 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005768 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5769 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005770 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005771 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005772
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005773- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5774 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5775
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005776- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5777 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5778
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005779- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5780 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5781 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5782 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5783
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005784- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5785 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005786 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005787 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5788 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005789
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005790- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5791
5792
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005793Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005794-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005795
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005796- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005797 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005798 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5799 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5800
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005801- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5802 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5803
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005804- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5805 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5806 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5807 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5808
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005809- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5810 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5811 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5812
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005813- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5814
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005815- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5816
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005817- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5818 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5819 that are still imported into string.py).
5820
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005821- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5822
5823- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5824 Now it does.
5825
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005826- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5827
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005828- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5829 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5830 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5831 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5832 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005833 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5834 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005835
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005836- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5837 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5838 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5839 'help(object)'.
5840
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005841Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005842-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005843
5844- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005845 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005846 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5847 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5848
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005849- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005850 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5851 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005852
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005853C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005854-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005855
5856- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5857 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005858
5859----
5860
5861**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**