blob: 926ac5233d03332bcbf485a92dacc3418f7909d8 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000013- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000014 an ferror() call.
15
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000016- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
17 list.sort().
18
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000019- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
20 (2+3) --> (5).
21
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000022- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
23
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000024- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
25 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000026
27Extension Modules
28-----------------
29
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000030- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
31 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000032
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000033- stat_float_times is now True.
34
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000035- array.array objects are now picklable.
36
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000037- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
38 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
39
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000040- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
41 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
42 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
43
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000044- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
45 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000046
47Library
48-------
49
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +000050- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
51
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +000052- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
53
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +000054- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
55
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000056- Enhancements to the csv module:
57
58 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
59 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
60 PEP 305.
61 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
62 reporting.
63 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
64 dictates.
65 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000066 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000067 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000068 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
69 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000070 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
71 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +000072 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000073 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
74 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
75 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
76 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
77 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
78 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
79 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
80 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
81 without first creating a dialect class.
82 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
83 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
84 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +000085 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000086 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
87 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +000088 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
89 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
90 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
91 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000092 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
93 This has been fixed.
94
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +000095- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
96 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
97 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
98 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
99
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000100- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
101
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000102- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
103 (Bug #951915).
104
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000105- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
106 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
107 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
108 encoding alias table
109
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000110- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
111
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000112- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
113 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
114
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000115- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
116
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000117- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
118
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000119- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
120
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000121- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
122
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000123- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
124
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000125- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
126 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
127 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
128
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000129- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000130 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000131
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000132- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
133 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
134 tokenizer with very long source lines.
135
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000136- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
137 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
138
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000139- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
140 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000141
142Build
143-----
144
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000145- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
146 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
147 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
148 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
149 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
150 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
151 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
152 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
153
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000154
155C API
156-----
157
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000158- Removed PyRange_New().
159
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000160
161Tests
162-----
163
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000164- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000165
166Mac
167---
168
169
170
171Tools/Demos
172-----------
173
174
175
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000176What's New in Python 2.4 final?
177===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000178
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000179*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000180
181Core and builtins
182-----------------
183
184- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
185 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
186 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
187
188
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000189What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
190==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000191
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000192*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000193
194Core and builtins
195-----------------
196
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000197- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
198 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
199 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
200
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000201
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000202Library
203-------
204
205- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
206 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
207 raised is re-raised.
208
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000209- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
210 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
211
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000212- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
213 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
214 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
215 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
216 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
217 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
218 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
219 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
220 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
221 by the slice are recomputed now.
222
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000223- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000224
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000225Build
226-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000227
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000228- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
229 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
230 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000231
232C API
233-----
234
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000235- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
236
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000237
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000238What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
239================================
240
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000241*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000242
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000243License
244-------
245
246The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
247is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
248changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
249Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
250intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
251durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
252the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
253License::
254
255 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
256
257says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
258to Python 2.1.1.
259
260The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
261License Version 2.
262
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000263Core and builtins
264-----------------
265
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000266- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
267 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
268 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
269 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
270 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
271 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
272 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
273 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
274 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
275 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
276
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000277- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000278
279Extension Modules
280-----------------
281
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000282- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
283 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
284 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
285 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000286
287Library
288-------
289
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000290- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
291 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
292 returned.
293
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000294- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
295
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000296- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
297 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
298
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000299- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
300
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000301- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
302 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000303
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000304- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
305
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000306- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
307
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000308- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000309 the source code is updated and reloaded.
310
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000311Build
312-----
313
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000314- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000315
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000316What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
317================================
318
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000319*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000320
321Core and builtins
322-----------------
323
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000324- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000325 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
326
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000327- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
328 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
329 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
330 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
331
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000332- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
333 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
334
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000335- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
336 constant.
337
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000338- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
339 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
340 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
341 large), and to anomalies such as
342 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
343 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
344 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
345 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000346
347Extension modules
348-----------------
349
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000350- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
351 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000352 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
353 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
354 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000355
356Library
357-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000358
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000359- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000360 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000361 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
362 --swig-cpp.
363
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000364- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
365 it is set.
366
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000367- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000368
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000369- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
370 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
371 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
372 Closes bug #1039270.
373
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000374- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000375
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000376 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000377 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
378 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
379 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
380 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
381 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
382 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
383 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
384 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
385 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
386 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
387 + Updates to documentation.
388
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000389- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
390 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
391 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
392 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
393
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000394- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000395
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000396- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
397 applications should use the getmember function.
398
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000399- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
400
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000401- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
402 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
403 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
404 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
405 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
406 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
407 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
408 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
409 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
410
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000411- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
412 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000413 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000414
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000415- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
416 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
417 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
418 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
419 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
420 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
421 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
422 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000423
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000424- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
425 the new public features (of which there are many).
426
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000427- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000428 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
429 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
430 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
431 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000432 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000433
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000434- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
435
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000436- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
437 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
438 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
439 options.
440
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000441- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
442 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
443 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
444 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
445 conditions under which non-string values work.
446
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000447Build
448-----
449
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000450- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
451 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
452 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
453
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000454- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
455 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
456 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
457 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
458 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000459
460C API
461-----
462
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000463- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
464 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
465
466- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
467
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000468- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
469 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
470 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
471 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
472 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
473 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
474 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
475 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
476 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
477
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000478- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
479
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000480- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
481 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
482 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000483
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000484Tests
485-----
486
487- test__locale ported to unittest
488
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000489Mac
490---
491
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000492- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
493 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
494 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000495
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000496Tools/Demos
497-----------
498
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000499- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
500 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
501 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
502 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
503 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000504
505
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000506What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
507=================================
508
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000509*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000510
511Core and builtins
512-----------------
513
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000514- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000515 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
516
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000517- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
518 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
519 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
520 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
521 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
522 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
523 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
524 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000525 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
526 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
527 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
528 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
529 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000530
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000531- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
532 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
533 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
534 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
535 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
536
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000537- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
538
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000539- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
540 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
541
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000542- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
543 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
544 modified the list.
545
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000546- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
547 functions is now writable.
548
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000549- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
550 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
551 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
552 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
553
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000554- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
555 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
556 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
557 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
558 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000559
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000560- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
561 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
562
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000563Extension modules
564-----------------
565
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000566- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
567
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000568- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
569 data.
570
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000571- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
572 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
573 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
574 supposed to have been truncated away.
575
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000576- Added socket.socketpair().
577
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000578- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
579 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
580
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000581- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000582 versions of Python, have now been removed.
583
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000584Library
585-------
586
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000587- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000588 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000589
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000590- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
591 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
592
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000593- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
594 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
595
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000596- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
597
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000598- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
599 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000600
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000601- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
602 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
603
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000604- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
605
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000606- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
607
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000608- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
609
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000610- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
611 Percivall.
612
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000613- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
614 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
615
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000616- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
617 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
618 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000619 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000620
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000621- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
622 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
623 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
624 and exponent.
625
626- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
627
628- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
629 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
630 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
631
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000632- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
633 to the readline module.
634
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000635- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000636 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
637 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000638
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000639- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
640 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
641 contains symlinks.
642
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000643- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
644 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
645
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000646- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
647 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
648 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
649
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000650- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
651 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
652 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
653 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
654 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
655 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
656 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
657 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
658 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
659 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
660 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
661 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
662 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
663
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000664- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
665
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000666Tools/Demos
667-----------
668
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000669- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
670 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
671
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000672- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
673
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000674Build
675-----
676
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000677- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
678 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
679 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
680 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
681 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
682 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
683 plans to do so.
684
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000685- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
686 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
687
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000688- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
689 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
690
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000691- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
692 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
693
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000694- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
695 GNU/k*BSD systems.
696
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000697- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
698 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
699
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000700C API
701-----
702
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000703..
704
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000705Documentation
706-------------
707
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000708- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
709 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
710
711- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
712 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
713 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000714
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000715New platforms
716-------------
717
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000718- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
719
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000720Tests
721-----
722
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000723..
724
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000725Windows
726-------
727
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000728- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
729 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
730 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
731 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
732 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
733 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
734 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
735 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
736 the problem.
737
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000738Mac
739---
740
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000741..
742
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000743
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000744What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
745=================================
746
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000747*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000748
749Core and builtins
750-----------------
751
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000752- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
753 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
754 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
755 sensitive code.
756
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000757- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000758 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000759
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000760 @staticmethod
761 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000762
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000763 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000764
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000765- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
766 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
767 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
768 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
769 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
770 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
771 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
772 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
773 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
774 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
775 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
776
777 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
778 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
779 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
780 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
781 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
782 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
783 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
784
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000785- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
786 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
787
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000788- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000789 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000790
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000791- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000792 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000793 which was missing for no apparent reason.
794
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000795- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000796 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
797 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
798
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000799- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
800 types that support garbage collection.
801
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000802- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
803
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000804- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
805 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
806 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
807 Jython.
808
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000809- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
810
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000811- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
812 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
813
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000814- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
815 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
816 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000817
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000818- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
819 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
820 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
821
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000822Extension modules
823-----------------
824
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000825- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
826
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000827Library
828-------
829
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000830- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
831 TIS-620
832
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000833- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
834 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
835 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
836 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
837 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
838 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
839 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
840 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
841 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
842 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
843
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000844- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
845
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000846- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
847 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
848 same as when the argument is omitted).
849 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
850
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000851- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
852
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000853- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
854 schemes are offered.
855
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000856- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
857
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000858- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
859 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
860 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
861
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000862- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
863
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000864- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
865 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
866
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000867- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
868 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
869 when dummy_threading is being used.
870
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000871- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
872 from a tarfile.
873
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000874- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000875 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000876
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000877- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
878 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
879 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
880 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
881
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000882- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
883 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
884
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000885- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
886 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
887 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
888 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
889 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
890 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
891 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
892 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
893 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
894 by some other method in progress).
895
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000896- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
897 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
898 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000899
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000900- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
901
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000902- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
903 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
904 AM Kuchling.
905
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000906- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
907 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
908 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
909
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000910- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
911 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
912 instead of unsigned.
913
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000914- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000915 no longer part of the public API.
916
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000917- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
918 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
919 string methods of the same name).
920
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000921- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000922 SF patch 945642.
923
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000924- doctest unittest integration improvements:
925
926 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
927
928 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
929 DocTestSuites.
930
931- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
932 that provide thread-local data.
933
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000934- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
935 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
936
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000937- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
938
939- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
940 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
941 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
942
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000943- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
944
945 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
946 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
947 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000948
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000949 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
950 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
951 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
952 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
953
954 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
955 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
956
957 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
958 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
959 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
960 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
961
962 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
963 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
964 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
965 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
966 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
967
968 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
969 wrapping help output.
970
971 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
972 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
973 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000974
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000975C API
976-----
977
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000978- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
979 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
980 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
981 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
982 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
983 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
984 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
985 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
986 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
987 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
988 its visible semantics have not changed.
989
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000990- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
991 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
992
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000993Documentation
994-------------
995
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000996- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000997
998 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000999 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001000
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001001 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001002
1003 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1004
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001005- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001006
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001007Tests
1008-----
1009
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001010- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001011 platforms that use the Makefile.
1012
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001013- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1014 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1015 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1016
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001017
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001018What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1019=================================
1020
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001021*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001022
1023Core and builtins
1024-----------------
1025
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001026- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1027 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1028 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1029 objects now (one object instead of three).
1030
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001031- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1032 Windows DLLs.
1033
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001034- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1035 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001036
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001037- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1038 a new .pyc magic.
1039
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001040- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1041 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1042 be there.
1043
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001044- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1045 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1046 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1047
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001048- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1049 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1050 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1051
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001052- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1053
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001054- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1055 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1056 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001057
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001058- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1059 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1060
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001061- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1062
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001063- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001064 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001065
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001066- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1067
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001068- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1069
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001070- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1071 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1072
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001073- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1074 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1075 Fixes bug #858016 .
1076
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001077- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1078 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1079 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1080
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001081- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1082 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1083 improves their performance (about 35%).
1084
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001085- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1086 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1087 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1088
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001089- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1090 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1091 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1092 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1093
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001094- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1095 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1096 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1097 length is not known).
1098
1099- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1100 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001101 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1102 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001103 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1104
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001105- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1106 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1107
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001108- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1109 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1110 keyword arguments.
1111
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001112- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1113 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1114 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1115
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001116- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1117 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1118 cases.
1119
1120- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1121 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1122 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1123 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1124 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1125 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1126 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1127 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1128 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1129 a release build.
1130
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001131- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1132 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1133
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001134- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001135 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001136
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001137- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1138 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1139 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1140 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1141 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1142 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1143 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1144 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1145 destroyed.
1146
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001147- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1148 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1149 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1150 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1151 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1152 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1153 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1154 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1155
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001156- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1157 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1158 character other than a space.
1159
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001160- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1161 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1162 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1163 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1164 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1165 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1166 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1167 attributes with the same name.
1168
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001169- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1170 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1171 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1172 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1173 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1174 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1175 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1176 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1177 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1178 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1179 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1180 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1181 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1182 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001183
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001184- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1185 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1186 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1187 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1188 This has been repaired.
1189
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001190- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1191
1192- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1193
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001194- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1195 over a sequence.
1196
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001197- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001198 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001199
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001200- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1201
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001202- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1203 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1204 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1205 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1206 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1207 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1208 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1209 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1210
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001211- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1212 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1213 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1214
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001215- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1216 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1217 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1218 freelist.
1219
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001220- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1221 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1222
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001223- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1224 number.
1225
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001226- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1227 a TypeError exception.
1228
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001229- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1230 820195.
1231
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001232- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1233 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1234 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1235
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001236- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001237 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1238 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001239
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001240- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1241 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1242 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1243
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001244- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1245 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001246 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001247
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001248- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001249 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1250 the first call.
1251
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001252
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001253Extension modules
1254-----------------
1255
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001256- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1257 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1258
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001259- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1260 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1261 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1262 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1263 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1264 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1265 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001266
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001267- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1268
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001269- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1270
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001271- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1272 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1273
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001274- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1275 fewer false positives.
1276
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001277- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1278 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1279
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001280- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001281 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1282
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001283- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001284 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001285 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001286 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1287 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001288
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001289- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1290 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1291 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1292 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1293
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001294- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1295 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1296 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1297 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1298 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1299 #897625.
1300
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001301- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1302 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1303
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001304- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1305 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1306 and pops on either side of the deque.
1307
1308- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1309 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1310
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001311- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1312 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1313 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1314 other functions that expect a function argument.
1315
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001316- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1317
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001318- os.getsid was added.
1319
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001320- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1321 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1322 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1323
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001324- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1325
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001326- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1327
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001328- readline.clear_history was added.
1329
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001330- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1331
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001332- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1333
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001334- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1335
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001336- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1337
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001338- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1339
1340- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1341
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001342- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1343
1344- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1345
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001346- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1347 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1348 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1349
1350- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1351 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1352 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1353 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1354 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1355 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1356 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1357
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001358- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1359 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1360 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1361 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001362
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001363- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001364 iterators from a single iterable.
1365
1366- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1367 of raising a TypeError exception.
1368
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001369- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1370 as parameter.
1371
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001372Library
1373-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001374
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001375- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1376 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1377 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001378
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001379- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1380 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1381 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001382
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001383- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001384
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001385- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1386 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001387
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001388- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1389 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1390
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001391- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1392
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001393- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001394 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001395
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001396- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001397 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001398
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001399- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1400
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001401- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1402 on cygwin and mingw32.
1403
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001404- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1405
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001406- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1407 module.
1408
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001409- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1410 installation scheme for all platforms.
1411
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001412- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001413 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001414
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001415- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1416 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1417 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1418
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001419- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1420 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1421 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1422
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001423- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1424
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001425- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1426
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001427- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1428 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1429
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001430- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1431 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1432 type pattern with the same value exists.
1433
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001434- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1435 when run from the command prompt).
1436
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001437- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1438 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1439
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001440- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1441 default sort).
1442
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001443- Added global runctx function to profile module
1444
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001445- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1446
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001447- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1448
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001449- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1450
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001451- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001452 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1453 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1454 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1455 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1456 accordingly.
1457
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001458- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1459 decoding standards.
1460
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001461- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1462 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1463 called for all requests.
1464
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001465- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1466 they are passed to the compiler.
1467
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001468- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1469 indent, width and depth.
1470
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001471- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1472 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1473
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001474- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1475 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1476
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001477- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1478
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001479- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1480
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001481- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1482
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001483- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1484 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1485
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001486- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001487 for better performance.
1488
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001489- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001490
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001491- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1492 a string).
1493
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001494- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1495
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001496- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1497
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001498- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1499
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001500- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1501
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001502- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1503 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1504 list of fieldnames.
1505
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001506- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1507 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1508
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001509- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1510
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001511- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1512 empty lists.
1513
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001514- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1515 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1516 and shelves.
1517
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001518- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1519 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1520
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001521- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001522 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1523 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001524
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001525- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1526 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001527 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001528
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001529- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001530 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1531 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1532
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001533- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1534 and removed in Py2.4.
1535
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001536- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1537
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001538- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1539
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001540Tools/Demos
1541-----------
1542
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001543- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1544 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1545
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001546- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1547
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001548- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1549 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1550 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1551 destination in situations where both files are given.
1552
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001553- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1554 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1555 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1556 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1557
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001558- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1559
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001560- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1561 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1562 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1563 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1564 now.
1565
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001566- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1567 in effect
1568
1569- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1570 C-c C-h
1571
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001572- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1573 -d option was given.
1574
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001575Build
1576-----
1577
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001578- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1579 build under OS X.
1580
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001581- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1582 --enable-profiling.
1583
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001584- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1585 is configured --with-tsc.
1586
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001587- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1588 on AMD64.
1589
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001590- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1591 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1592
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001593- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1594 removed.
1595
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001596- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1597 supported (see PEP 11).
1598
1599- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1600
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001601- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1602
1603- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1604 (see PEP 11).
1605
1606- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1607 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1608
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001609C API
1610-----
1611
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001612- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1613 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1614 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1615
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001616- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1617 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1618 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1619 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1620
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001621- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1622 generator objects.
1623
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001624- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1625 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001626 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1627 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001628
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001629- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1630 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1631
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001632- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1633 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1634 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1635 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1636 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1637
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001638- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1639 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1640 about 10% faster.
1641
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001642- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1643 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1644
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001645- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1646 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1647 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1648 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1649
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001650Windows
1651-------
1652
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001653- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1654 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1655 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1656 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1657
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001658- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1659 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1660 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1661
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001662
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001663What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1664===============================
1665
1666*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1667
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001668IDLE
1669----
1670
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001671- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1672 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1673 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1674 context-menu actions.
1675
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001676- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1677 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1678 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1679 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1680 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1681 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1682 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1683 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1684 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1685
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001686
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001687What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1688=============================================
1689
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001690*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001691
1692Core and builtins
1693-----------------
1694
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001695- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001696 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001697 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1698
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001699Extension modules
1700-----------------
1701
1702- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1703 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1704 than once. This has been fixed.
1705
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001706- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1707 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1708 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1709 call.
1710
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001711- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1712
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001713Library
1714-------
1715
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001716- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1717 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1718
1719- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1720 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1721 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1722 restored.
1723
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001724IDLE
1725----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001726
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001727- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001728
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001729Build
1730-----
1731
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001732- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1733 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1734
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001735C API
1736-----
1737
1738Windows
1739-------
1740
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001741- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1742 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1743
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001744- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1745
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001746Mac
1747---
1748
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001749- Various fixes to pimp.
1750
1751- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1752
1753- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1754 more problems than it solves.
1755
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001756
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001757What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1758=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001759
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001760*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1761
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001762Core and builtins
1763-----------------
1764
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001765- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1766 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1767
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001768- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1769 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001770 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001771
1772- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1773 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1774 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001775 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001776
1777- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1778 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001779
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001780- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1781 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1782 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1783
1784- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001785 770247.
1786
1787- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001788
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001789Extension modules
1790-----------------
1791
1792- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1793 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1794
1795- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1796
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001797- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1798
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001799- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1800 contained within the _strptime module.
1801
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001802- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1803 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1804
1805- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001806 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1807
1808- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1809 the find_class attribute, if present.
1810
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001811- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001812
1813 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1814 (SF bug 763298).
1815
1816 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001817 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1818 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1819 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001820
1821 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1822
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001823Library
1824-------
1825
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001826- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1827
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001828- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1829 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1830 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1831 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1832 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1833 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1834 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1835 or Tester().
1836
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001837- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1838 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1839 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1840 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1841 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1842 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1843 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1844 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1845 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001846
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001847 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001848
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001849- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1850 weren't before was an oversight.
1851
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001852- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1853 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1854
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001855- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1856 when there are no lines.
1857
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001858- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1859 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1860
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001861- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1862 to child processes.
1863
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001864- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1865
1866- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1867
1868- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1869 xmlrpclib.
1870
1871- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1872 responses.
1873
1874- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1875 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1876
1877- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1878 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1879 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1880
1881- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1882 used as patterns.
1883
1884- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1885 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1886 than Tk 8.3.
1887
1888- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1889
1890- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001891
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001892Tools/Demos
1893-----------
1894
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001895- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1896
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001897- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1898
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001899- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001900
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001901Build
1902-----
1903
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001904- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1905
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001906- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1907
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001908- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1909 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001910
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001911- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1912 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1913 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001914
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001915C API
1916-----
1917
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001918- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1919 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1920
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001921Windows
1922-------
1923
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001924- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1925 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1926 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1927 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1928 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1929 Python exception ::
1930
1931 thread.error: can't start new thread
1932
1933 is raised now.
1934
1935- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1936 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1937 instead of from DLL teardown.
1938
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001939Mac
1940---
1941
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001942- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001943 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001944 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1945 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1946 the executable in the bundle.
1947
1948- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001949
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001950- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1951
1952- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1953 on Panther.
1954
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001955What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1956================================
1957
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001958*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001959
1960Core and builtins
1961-----------------
1962
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001963- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1964 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1965 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1966 with the -i option.
1967
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001968- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1969 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1970
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001971- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1972 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1973
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001974- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1975 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1976 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1977 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1978 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1979 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1980 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1981 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1982 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1983 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1984 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1985 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1986 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001987
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001988- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1989 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1990 embedded in a lambda expression.
1991
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001992- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1993 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1994 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1995 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1996 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1997
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001998- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1999 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2000 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2001
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002002- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2003 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2004
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002005- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2006 It's writable again.
2007
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002008- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2009 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2010 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002011 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002012
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002013- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2014 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2015 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2016
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002017Extension modules
2018-----------------
2019
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002020- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2021 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2022
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002023- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2024 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2025 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2026 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2027
2028- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2029 collection.
2030
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002031- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2032 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2033 unique within a single program run.
2034
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002035- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2036 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2037
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002038- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2039 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2040
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002041- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2042 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002043
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002044- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2045
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002046- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2047 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2048
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002049- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2050 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2051 for many BSD-derived systems.
2052
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002053
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002054Library
2055-------
2056
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002057- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2058 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2059 primary ones:
2060
2061 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2062 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2063 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2064
2065 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2066 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2067 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2068 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2069 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2070 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2071
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002072- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2073 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2074 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2075 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2076 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2077 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2078 argument.
2079
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002080- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2081 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2082 in the archive.
2083
2084- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2085 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2086
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002087- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2088 569574).
2089
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002090- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2091 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2092 no more.
2093
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002094- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2095 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2096 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2097 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2098 code coverage.
2099
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002100- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2101 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2102 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002103 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2104 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002105
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002106- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2107 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2108 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002109 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002110
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002111- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2112
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002113- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2114 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2115 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2116 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2117
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002118- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2119 handling.
2120
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002121- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2122 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2123
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002124- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2125 in socket.py.
2126
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002127- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2128
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002129- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2130 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2131 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2132 opener with proxy support.
2133
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002134- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2135
2136- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2137
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002138Tools/Demos
2139-----------
2140
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002141- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2142
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002143- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2144
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002145- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2146 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002147
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002148- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2149 files.
2150
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002151Build
2152-----
2153
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002154- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002155 different root directory.
2156
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002157C API
2158-----
2159
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002160- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2161 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2162 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2163 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2164 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2165 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2166 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2167 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2168 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2169 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2170
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002171- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2172 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2173 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2174 from Python.
2175
2176
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002177New platforms
2178-------------
2179
2180None this time.
2181
2182Tests
2183-----
2184
2185- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2186 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2187
2188Windows
2189-------
2190
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002191- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2192
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002193- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2194 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2195 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2196 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2197 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2198 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2199 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2200 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2201 that's what it's for.
2202
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002203Mac
2204---
2205
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002206- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2207 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2208 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2209 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002210- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2211 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2212- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002213
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002214SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2215------------------------------------
2216
2217430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2218598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2219622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2220661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2221683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2222697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2223713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2224724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2225727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2226729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2227730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2228731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2229732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2230733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2231735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2232740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2233744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2234745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2235747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2236749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2237751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2238753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2239755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2240757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2241760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2242
2243
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002244What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2245================================
2246
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002247*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002248
2249Core and builtins
2250-----------------
2251
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002252- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2253 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2254
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002255- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2256 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2257 and cannot be strings).
2258
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002259- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2260 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2261 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2262 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2263
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002264- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2265 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2266 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2267 Python itself.
2268
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002269- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2270 the referenced object, if it has one.
2271
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002272- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2273 the thread started at
2274 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2275
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002276- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2277 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2278 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2279 placed on a list index.
2280
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002281- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2282 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2283 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2284 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2285
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002286- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2287 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2288 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2289 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2290 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2291 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2292 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2293
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002294- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2295 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2296 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2297 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2298 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2299
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002300- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2301 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002302
2303- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2304 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2305 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2306 #693195.)
2307
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002308- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2309 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002310
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002311- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002312 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002313 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2314 interpreter executions, would fail.
2315
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002316- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002317 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002318 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002319
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002320Extension modules
2321-----------------
2322
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002323- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2324 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2325 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2326 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2327
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002328- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2329 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2330
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002331- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2332 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2333 and Greg Chapman.)
2334
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002335- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2336 recursively.
2337
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002338- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002339 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2340 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2341 leaks.
2342
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002343- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2344
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002345- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2346 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2347 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2348 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2349 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2350 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2351 #705836.
2352
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002353- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002354 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2355
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002356- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2357 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2358 See SF bug #692416.
2359
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002360- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2361 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2362
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002363- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2364 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2365 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002366
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002367- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002368 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2369 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2370
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002371- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2372 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2373 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2374 timeouts to work properly.
2375
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002376Library
2377-------
2378
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002379- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2380 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2381 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2382 future release.
2383
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002384- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2385 for querying platform dependent features.
2386
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002387- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002388
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002389- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2390 pickle protocol versions.
2391
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002392- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2393 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2394 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2395
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002396- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2397
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002398- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2399 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2400 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2401 modules.
2402
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002403- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2404 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2405 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2406
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002407- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2408 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2409
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002410- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2411 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2412 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2413
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002414- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002415 MS Office extensions.
2416
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002417- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2418 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2419
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002420- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2421 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2422
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002423- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2424 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2425 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2426 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2427 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2428 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2429
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002430- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2431 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2432 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002433
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002434- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2435 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2436 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2437
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002438- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2439
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002440- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2441 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2442 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2443
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002444Tools/Demos
2445-----------
2446
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002447- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2448 See the module docstring for details.
2449
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002450Build
2451-----
2452
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002453- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2454 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002455
2456C API
2457-----
2458
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002459- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2460
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002461- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2462 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2463 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2464
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002465- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2466 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002467
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002468 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2469 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2470 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002471
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002472- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002473 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2474
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002475- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2476 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2477 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002478
2479New platforms
2480-------------
2481
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002482None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002483
2484Tests
2485-----
2486
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002487- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2488 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002489
2490Windows
2491-------
2492
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002493- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2494 function.
2495
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002496- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2497 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002498
2499Mac
2500---
2501
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002502- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2503 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002504
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002505- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2506 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002507
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002508- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2509 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2510 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002511
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002512- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002513 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2514 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002515
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002516- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2517 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002518
2519
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002520What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2521=================================
2522
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002523*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002524
2525Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002526-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002527
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002528- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2529 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2530 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2531
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002532- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2533 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2534 (SF patch #664376.)
2535
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002536- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2537 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2538 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2539 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2540 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2541 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002542 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002543
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002544- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2545 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2546 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2547 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002548 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002549
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002550- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2551 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2552 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2553 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2554 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2555 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2556 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2557 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2558 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2559 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2560 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2561
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002562- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2563 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2564 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2565 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2566 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2567 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2568
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002569- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2570 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2571
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002572- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2573 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2574 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2575 case.)
2576
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002577- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2578 passed as unicode strings.
2579
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002580- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2581 See SF bug #683467.
2582
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002583- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2584 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2585
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002586- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2587
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002588- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2589
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002590- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2591 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2592 arguments.
2593
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002594- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2595 See SF bug #667147.
2596
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002597- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002598 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002599 See SF bug #676155.
2600
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002601- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002602 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002603 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2604 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2605 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2606 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2607 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2608 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002609
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002610Extension modules
2611-----------------
2612
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002613- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2614 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2615 tp_as_number pointer.
2616
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002617- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2618 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2619 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2620 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2621 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2622
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002623- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2624
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002625- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2626
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002627- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002628 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002629 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2630 patch #678531.)
2631
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002632- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2633 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2634
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002635- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2636 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2637
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002638- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2639
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002640- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2641 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2642 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2643
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002644- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2645
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002646- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2647 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2648
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002649- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002650
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002651- datetime changes:
2652
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002653 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2654
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002655 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2656 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2657 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2658 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2659 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2660 now.
2661
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002662 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002663 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2664 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002665
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002666 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002667 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002668 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2669 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2670 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2671 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002672
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002673 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2674 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2675 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002676 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2677
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002678 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2679 by a later example coded by Guido.
2680
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002681 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002682 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2683 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2684 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002685 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2686 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2687
2688 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2689 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2690 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2691 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2692 tzinfo subclass instance.
2693
2694 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2695 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2696 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2697 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2698 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2699 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2700 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2701 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002702
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002703 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2704 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2705 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2706 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2707 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002708 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2709
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002710 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002711
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002712 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2713 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2714 as a naive datetime object.
2715
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002716 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2717 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2718 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2719
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002720 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2721 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2722 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2723 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2724 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2725 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2726 comparison.
2727
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002728 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2729 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2730 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2731 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002732 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002733
2734 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002735
2736 and ::
2737
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002738 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2739
2740 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2741 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2742 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2743 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2744
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002745 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2746 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2747 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2748 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2749 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2750
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002751 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2752 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002753 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2754 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002755
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002756Library
2757-------
2758
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002759- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2760 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2761
2762- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2763 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2764 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2765 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2766 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2767 See PEP 307 for details.
2768
2769- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2770 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2771
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002772- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2773 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002774 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002775 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2776 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002777 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002778
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002779- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2780 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2781
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002782- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2783 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2784 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2785
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002786- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2787
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002788- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2789 exception.
2790
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002791- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2792 class.
2793
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002794- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2795 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2796 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2797
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002798- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2799 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2800
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002801- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002802 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2803 See SF bug #659228.
2804
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002805- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2806 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2807 See SF patch #651082.
2808
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002809- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002810
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002811- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2812 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2813
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002814- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002815 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002816
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002817- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2818 DOS paths from other platforms.
2819
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002820Tools/Demos
2821-----------
2822
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002823- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2824 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2825 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2826 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2827 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2828 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2829 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2830 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2831 example:
2832
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002833 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2834 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002835
2836 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2837
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002838
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002839Build
2840-----
2841
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002842- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2843 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2844 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002845 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2846
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002847 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2848
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002849- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2850 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2851 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2852 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2853 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2854 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2855 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2856 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2857 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2858
2859- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2860 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2861 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2862 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2863
2864- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2865 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2866
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002867C API
2868-----
2869
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002870- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2871 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002872
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002873- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2874 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2875 tp_as_number pointer.
2876
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002877- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2878 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2879 (SF #681367)
2880
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002881- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2882 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2883 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2884 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002885
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002886Tests
2887-----
2888
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002889- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002890 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2891 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2892 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2893 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2894 pydoc.)
2895
2896- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2897
2898- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002899
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002900Windows
2901-------
2902
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002903- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2904 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2905 time).
2906
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002907- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2908 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2909
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002910- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2911 release without strong cryptography.
2912
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002913- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002914 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002915
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002916- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2917 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2918
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002919Mac
2920---
2921
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002922- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2923 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002924
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002925- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2926 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2927 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002928
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002929- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2930 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002931
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002932- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2933 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2934 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2935 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002936
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002937- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002938 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2939 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2940 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002941
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002942
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002943What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002944=================================
2945
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002946*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002947
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002948Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002949--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002950
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002951- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2952
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002953- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2954 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002955 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002956 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002957 a different meaning than before.
2958
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002959- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002960 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002961 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002962
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002963- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002964 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002965 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002966
2967- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2968 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2969 and deallocation.
2970
2971- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2972 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2973
2974- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2975 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2976 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2977 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2978 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2979
2980- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2981 now detected by the garbage collector.
2982
2983- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2984 [SF bug 519621]
2985
2986- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2987 identifier.
2988
2989- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2990 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2991 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2992 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2993 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2994 [SF bug 563060]
2995
2996- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2997 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2998 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2999 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3000 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3001
3002- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3003 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3004 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3005
3006- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3007
3008- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3009 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3010 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3011 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3012 state of the slots would be lost.)
3013
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003014Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003015-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003016
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003017- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003018 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3019 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3020 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3021 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003022 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3023 Jython 2.1.
3024
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003025- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003026 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003027 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3028 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3029 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3030 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3031 these, see PEP 302.
3032
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003033- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3034 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3035 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3036
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003037- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3038 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3039 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3040
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003041- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3042 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3043 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3044
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003045- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3046 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3047 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3048 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3049 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3050 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3051 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3052 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3053 releases or implementations.
3054
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003055- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003056 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3057 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003058
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003059- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3060 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3061
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003062- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3063 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3064 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3065
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003066- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3067 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3068
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003069- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3070 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003071 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3072 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003073
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003074- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3075 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3076 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3077 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3078 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3079
3080 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3081 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3082 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3083 pattern.
3084
3085 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3086 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3087 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3088 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3089
3090 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3091 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3092 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3093 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3094 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3095 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3096
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003097- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3098 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3099 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3100 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3101 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3102 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3103 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3104 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003105
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003106- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3107 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3108 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3109 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3110 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003111 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3112 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3113 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3114 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3115 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3116 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3117 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003118
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003119- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3120 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3121
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003122- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3123 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3124 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3125 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3126 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3127 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3128 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3129 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3130 to Zack Weinberg!
3131
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003132- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3133 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3134 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3135 type. This has been fixed now.
3136
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003137- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3138 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3139 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3140
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003141- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3142 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3143 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3144 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3145 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3146 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3147 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3148 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003149 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003150
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003151- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3152 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3153 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003154
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003155- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3156 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3157 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3158 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3159 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3160 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3161 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3162 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003163 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003164 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3165 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3166
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003167- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3168 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3169 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3170 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3171 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3172 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3173 this.)
3174
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003175- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3176 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003177 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003178 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003179 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3180 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003181 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3182 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003183
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003184- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3185 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3186 currently running.
3187
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003188- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3189 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3190 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3191 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3192
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003193- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3194 as directory names.
3195
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003196- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3197 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3198
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003199- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3200 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3201
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003202- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003203 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3204 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003205
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003206- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3207 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3208 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3209 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3210 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3211
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003212- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3213 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3214 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3215 removed.
3216
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003217- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3218 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3219 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3220
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003221- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3222 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3223 to __debug__.
3224
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003225- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3226 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3227 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3228
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003229- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3230 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3231 deprecated now.
3232
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003233- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3234 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3235 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003236
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003237- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3238 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3239 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3240 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3241 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003242
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003243- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3244 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3245
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003246- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3247 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3248 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003249 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003250 is backward compatible.
3251
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003252- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3253 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3254 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3255 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3256 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3257
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003258- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3259 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3260 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3261 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3262 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3263 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003264
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003265- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3266 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3267
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003268- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3269 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3270
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003271- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3272 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3273 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3274 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3275 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3276
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003277- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3278 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3279 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3280
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003281- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003282 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3283
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003284- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3285 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3286 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003287
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003288- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3289 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3290
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003291- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3292 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3293 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3294
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003295- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3296
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003297Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003298-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003299
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003300- Added three operators to the operator module:
3301 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3302 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3303 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3304
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003305- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3306
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003307- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3308 archives.
3309
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003310- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3311 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3312 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3313
3314 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3315
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003316- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3317 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3318 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003319 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003320
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003321- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3322 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3323 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3324 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003325 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3326 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3327 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3328 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003329
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003330- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3331 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003332
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003333- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3334
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003335- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3336 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3337
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003338- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3339 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3340 supported.
3341
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003342- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3343
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003344- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3345 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003346
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003347- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3348 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3349
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003350- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3351
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003352- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3353 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3354
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003355- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3356 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3357 functions but callable type objects.
3358
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003359- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003360 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003361 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003362
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003363- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3364 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003365
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003366- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3367 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003368
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003369- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3370 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3371 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3372 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3373
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003374- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3375 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003376
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003377- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3378 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3379 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3380 and __imul__.
3381
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003382- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003383 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3384 is called.
3385
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003386- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3387 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3388 interpreter was compiled.
3389
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003390- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3391 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3392 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003393 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003394 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3395 1, not 2.
3396
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003397- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3398 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3399 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3400 limit.
3401
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003402- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3403 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3404 bug #623464.
3405
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003406- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3407 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3408 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3409 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3410
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003411Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003412-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003413
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003414- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3415
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003416- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3417 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3418 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3419 with Python 2.3a2.
3420
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003421- os.path exposes getctime.
3422
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003423- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003424 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003425 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003426 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003427 unit tests of floating point results.
3428
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003429- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3430 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3431 has been increased.
3432
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003433- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3434 executed.
3435
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003436- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3437 postinstallation script.
3438
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003439- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3440 test the current module.
3441
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003442- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003443 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3444 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3445 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3446 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3447
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003448- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003449 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003450 Ward's Optik package.
3451
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003452- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3453 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3454 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3455 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3456
3457- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3458 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003459 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003460
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003461- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3462 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3463 shelf are binary pickles.
3464
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003465- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3466 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3467
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003468- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3469 modules are iterators now.
3470
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003471- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3472 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3473 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3474 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3475 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3476 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003477
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003478- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3479 with their entity value.
3480
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003481- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3482
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003483- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3484 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003485
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003486- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3487 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003488 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003489
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003490- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3491 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3492 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3493 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3494 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3495 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3496 main():
3497
3498 import locale
3499 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3500
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003501- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3502 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3503
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003504- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3505 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3506 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3507 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3508 to the new standard.
3509
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003510- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3511 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3512 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3513 an extension to the database.
3514
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003515- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3516 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3517 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3518 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003519 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003520
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003521- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003522 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003523
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003524- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3525 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3526 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3527 bounded integers.
3528
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003529- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3530 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3531 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3532 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3533 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3534 in existence.
3535
3536 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3537 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3538 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3539 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3540 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3541 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3542
3543 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3544 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3545 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3546 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3547
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003548- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3549 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3550 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3551
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003552- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3553
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003554- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3555 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3556 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3557 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3558
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003559- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3560 argument.
3561
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003562- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3563 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3564 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3565 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3566 [SF patch 560794].
3567
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003568- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3569 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3570 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003571 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3572 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3573 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003574
3575- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3576 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003577
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003578- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3579 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3580 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3581 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003582
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003583- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3584 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3585 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3586 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3587 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3588
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003589- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003590
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003591- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3592
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003593- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3594 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3595 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3596 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3597 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3598 identical to None.
3599
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003600- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3601 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3602 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3603 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3604 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3605 results now.
3606
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003607- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3608 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3609
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003610- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3611 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3612 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3613 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3614 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3615 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3616 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3617 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3618
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003619- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3620
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003621- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3622 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3623
3624- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3625 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3626 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3627 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3628 and other systems.
3629
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003630- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3631 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3632 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3633 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 +00003634 work well with these.
3635
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003636- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3637
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003638- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003639 connections.
3640
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003641- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3642 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3643 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3644
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003645- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3646 sets
3647
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003648- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3649 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3650 name.
3651
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003652- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3653 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3654 passed in.
3655
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003656- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003657 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003658 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3659 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003660
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003661- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3662
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003663- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3664
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003665- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3666 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3667 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3668
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003669- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3670 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3671 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3672 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003673 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003674
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003675- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003676 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003677 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003678
3679- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3680 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3681 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3682
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003683- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003684 the value of its expression argument.
3685
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003686- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3687 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3688 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3689
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003690- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3691 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3692 skipstone browser was included.
3693
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003694- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3695 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3696
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003697Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003698-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003699
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003700- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3701 names in addition to accepting file names.
3702
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003703- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3704 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3705 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3706 still used and useful.)
3707
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003708- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3709 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3710 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3711 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003712
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003713- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3714 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3715 the generated binary.
3716
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003717Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003718-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003719
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003720- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3721
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003722- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3723 except in the hands of experts.
3724
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003725- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003726 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3727 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3728 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003729
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003730- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3731 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3732 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3733 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3734 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3735 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3736 builds.
3737
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003738- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3739 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3740 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3741 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3742 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3743 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3744 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3745 new type.
3746
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003747- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003748
3749 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3750 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3751 positive infinities.
3752
3753 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3754 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3755 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3756 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3757 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3758 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3759 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3760
3761 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3762
3763 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3764
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003765- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3766 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3767 size of the executable.
3768
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003769- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3770 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3771 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3772 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003773
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003774- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3775
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003776- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3777 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3778 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003779
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003780- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3781 well as Unix.
3782
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003783- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3784 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3785 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3786 modules in the README file for details.
3787
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003788C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003789-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003790
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003791- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3792 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003793 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003794 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003795 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003796
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003797- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3798 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3799 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3800 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3801 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3802 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003803 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003804 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3805 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3806 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3807 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3808 aligned.)
3809
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003810- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3811 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3812 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3813
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003814- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3815 level.
3816
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003817- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3818 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3819 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3820 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3821 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3822
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003823- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3824 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3825 code.
3826
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003827- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3828 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3829 adjusting for negative indices.
3830
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003831- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3832 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3833 object.
3834
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003835- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3836 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3837 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3838
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003839- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3840 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003841
3842- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3843
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003844- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3845 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3846 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3847 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3848
3849- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3850
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003851- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003852
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003853- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003854 without going through the buffer API.
3855
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003856- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003857
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003858- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3859 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3860 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3861 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3862
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003863- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3864 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3865
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003866- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003867 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3868
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003869New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003870-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003871
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003872- OpenVMS is now supported.
3873
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003874- AtheOS is now supported.
3875
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003876- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3877
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003878- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3879
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003880Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003881-----
3882
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003883- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3884 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3885 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003886
3887Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003888-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003889
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003890- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3891 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3892 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3893 bugs.
3894 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003895 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003896 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3897 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003898 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003899
3900- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003901 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003902
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003903- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3904 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3905
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003906- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3907 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003908 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003909 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3910
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003911- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3912 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3913 use files" uninstall option).
3914
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003915- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3916
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003917- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3918 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3919
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003920- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3921 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3922 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3923
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003924- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3925 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3926 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3927 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3928 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003929 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3930 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3931 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003932
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003933- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003934 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003935 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3936 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3937 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3938 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3939 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3940 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3941 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3942 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3943 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3944 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3945 work around.
3946
3947- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3948 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3949 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3950 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3951 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3952 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3953 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3954 specified with O_CREAT too).
3955
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003956Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003957----
3958
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003959- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003960
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003961- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3962 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3963 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3964
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003965- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3966 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3967 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3968
3969- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3970 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3971 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3972 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3973 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3974 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3975 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3976 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003977
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003978- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3979 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3980 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003981
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003982- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3983 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3984 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3985 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3986 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003987
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003988- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3989 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3990 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003991
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003992- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3993 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003994
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003995- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3996 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3997 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3998 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3999 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004000
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004001- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4002 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4003 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4004
4005- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4006 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4007 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004008
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004009- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4010 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4011 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4012 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004013 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004014
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004015- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4016 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004017
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004018- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4019 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004020
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004021- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004022 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004023 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4024 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004025
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004026
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004027What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004028===============================
4029
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004030*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4031
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004032Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004033--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004034
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004035- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4036 with a custom metaclass.
4037
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004038Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004039-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004040
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004041- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4042 are proxies.
4043
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004044Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004045-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004046
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004047- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4048 very short strings.
4049
4050- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4051 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4052 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4053 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4054 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4055
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004056Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004057-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004058
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004059- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4060 close or delete time).
4061
4062- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4063 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4064
4065- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4066
4067- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004068 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004069
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004070Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004071-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004072
4073Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004074-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004075
4076C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004077-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004078
4079New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004080-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004081
4082Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004083-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004084
4085Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004086-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004087
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004088- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4089
4090- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4091 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4092
4093- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4094 deleted at process exit time.
4095
4096- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4097 in backslash.
4098
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004099Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004100----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004101
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004102- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4103 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4104 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4105
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004106
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004107What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004108===========================
4109
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004110*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4111
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004112Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004113--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004114
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004115- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4116 been extensively updated. See
4117
4118 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4119
4120 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4121
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004122- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4123 deleted!
4124
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004125- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4126 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4127 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4128 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4129 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4130
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004131- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4132
4133 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4134 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4135
4136 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4137 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4138 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4139 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4140 supported anyway.
4141
4142 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4143 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4144
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004145- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4146 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4147 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4148 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4149 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004150
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004151- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4152 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4153 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4154
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004155Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004156-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004157
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004158- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4159 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4160 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4161 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4162 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4163 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004164 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4165 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4166 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4167 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004168
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004169- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4170 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4171 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4172
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004173Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004174-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004175
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004176- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4177
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004178Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004179-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004180
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004181- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4182 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4183 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4184 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4185 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4186 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4187
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004188- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4189
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004190- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4191
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004192- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4193
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004194- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4195 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4196 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4197
4198- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4199
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004200Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004201-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004202
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004203- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4204 off a search on Google.
4205
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004206Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004207-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004208
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004209- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4210 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4211 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4212 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4213 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4214 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4215 other platforms should do likewise.
4216
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004217- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4218 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4219 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4220
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004221C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004222-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004223
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004224- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4225 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4226 producing key-value pairs.
4227
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004228- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004229 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004230 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4231 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4232 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4233 previously went unchallenged.
4234
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004235New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004236-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004237
4238Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004239-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004240
4241Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004242-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004243
4244Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004245----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004246
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004247- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4248 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004249
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004250- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4251 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4252 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4253 home.
4254
4255
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004256What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004257===========================
4258
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004259*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4260
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004261Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004262--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004263
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004264- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4265 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004266
4267 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004268 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004269
4270 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4271 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004272 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004273 This needs to be documented.
4274
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004275- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4276 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4277
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004278- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4279 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4280 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4281
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004282- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4283 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4284
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004285- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4286 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4287 class forbids it).
4288
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004289- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4290 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4291 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4292
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004293- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4294
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004295Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004296-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004297
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004298- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4299 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004300 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004301
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004302- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4303 (like 1 + '').
4304
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004305Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004306-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004307
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004308- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4309 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4310 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4311 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004312 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004313 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4314
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004315- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4316 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4317 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4318 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4319
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004320- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4321 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004322 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4323 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4324 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004325
4326- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4327 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004328
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004329- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4330 bytes on its input.
4331
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004332Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004333-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004334
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004335- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004336 convenience function.
4337
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004338- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4339 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4340 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004341 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4342 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4343 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4344 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4345 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4346 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004347
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004348- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4349 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4350 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4351 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4352
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004353- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4354 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4355 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4356
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004357- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4358 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4359 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4360 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4361
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004362- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4363 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004364 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004365 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4366 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4367 new -l and -e options.
4368
4369- statcache is now deprecated.
4370
4371- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4372 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004373 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004374 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4375 time properly taken into account.
4376
4377- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4378 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4379 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4380 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4381
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004382Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004383-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004384
4385Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004386-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004387
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004388- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4389 is built with libdb3 if available.
4390
4391- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4392
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004393C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004394-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004395
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004396- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4397 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4398 PySequence_Size().
4399
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004400- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4401
4402- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4403 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4404 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4405
4406- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4407 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4408
4409- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4410 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4411
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004412New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004413-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004414
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004415- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4416 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4417
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004418- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4419 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4420
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004421- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4422
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004423Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004424-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004425
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004426- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4427 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4428
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004429Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004430-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004431
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004432Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004433----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004434
4435- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4436 removed completely in the next release.
4437
4438- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4439 OSX.
4440
4441- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4442 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4443
4444- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4445
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004446
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004447What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004448===========================
4449
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004450*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4451
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004452Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004453--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004454
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004455- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004456 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004457 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004458 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4459 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004460 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4461 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004462 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4463 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004464
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004465- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4466 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4467
4468- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4469 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4470
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004471Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004472-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004473
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004474- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4475 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4476 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4477 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4478 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4479 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4480 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4481 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4482
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004483- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4484 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4485 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4486 example).
4487
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004488- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004489 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004490 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004491 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004492
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004493- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4494 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4495 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004496 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004497
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004498- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4499 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4500 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4501 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4502 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4503 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4504
4505 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4506
4507 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4508
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004509Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004510-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004511
4512- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4513
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004514- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4515
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004516- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4517 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004518
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004519- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4520 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4521 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4522 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4523 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4524 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004525 attributes.
4526
4527- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4528 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4529 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004530
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004531- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4532 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4533 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004534
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004535- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4536 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4537 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004538 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4539 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4540
4541- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4542 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004543
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004544Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004545-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004546
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004547- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4548 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4549
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004550- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4551 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4552 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4553 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4554
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004555- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4556 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4557 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4558 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4559
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004560 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4561 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4562 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4563 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4564 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4565 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4566 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4567 without losing information).
4568
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004569- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004570 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4571 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4572 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4573 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4574 module).
4575
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004576 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004577 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4578 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4579 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4580 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004581
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004582- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004583 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4584 encoding.
4585
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004586- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4587 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4588
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004589- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004590 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4591
4592- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4593 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4594 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4595 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4596
4597- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4598
4599- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4600 ON, and OFF.
4601
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004602- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4603 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4604
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004605Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004606-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004607
4608- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4609 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4610 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004611
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004612- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4613 been added: -X and -E.
4614
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004615Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004616-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004617
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004618- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4619 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4620
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004621C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004622-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004623
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004624- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4625 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4626 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4627 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4628 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4629
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004630- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4631 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4632 as long) arguments.
4633
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004634- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4635 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4636 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4637 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4638 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4639 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4640
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004641- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4642 input.
4643
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004644New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004645-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004646
4647Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004648-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004649
4650Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004651-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004652
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004653- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4654 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4655 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4656
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004657- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4658 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4659 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004660 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004661
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004662 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4663 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4664 import signal
4665 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004666
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004667 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004668 while 1:
4669 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004670 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004671 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4672 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4673 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4674 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004675
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004676
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004677What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4678===========================
4679
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004680*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4681
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004682Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004683--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004684
4685- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4686 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4687 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4688
4689- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4690 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4691 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4692 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4693 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4694 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4695 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004696
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004697- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004698 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004699 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4700 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4701 associate a docstring with a property.
4702
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004703- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4704 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4705 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4706 other built-in object types.
4707
4708- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4709 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4710 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4711 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4712 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4713
4714- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4715 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4716
4717- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4718 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004719 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004720 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4721 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4722 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4723 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4724 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4725
4726- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4727 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4728 class.
4729
4730- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4731 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4732 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4733 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4734
4735- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4736 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4737 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4738 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4739
4740- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4741 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4742
4743- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4744 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4745 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4746 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4747 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004748 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004749 with the same value as s.
4750
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004751- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4752
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004753Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004754----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004755
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004756- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4757
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004758- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4759 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4760 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4761 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4762 objects.
4763
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004764- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4765 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004766 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4767 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4768
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004769- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4770 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4771 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4772
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004773Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004774-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004775
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004776- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4777 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4778 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4779 by the instances.
4780
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004781- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4782 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4783 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4784
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004785- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4786 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4787 before the entire comparison is complete.
4788
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004789- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4790 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4791 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4792
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004793- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4794 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4795 getwriter().
4796
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004797- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4798 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4799
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004800- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004801 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4802 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4803
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004804- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4805 iterable object.
4806
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004807- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4808 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004809
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004810- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4811 authentication.
4812
4813- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4814 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004815
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004816- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004817 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4818 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4819 a sample driver.)
4820
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004821Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004822-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004823
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004824- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4825 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4826 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4827 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4828 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4829 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4830 kernel has large file support.
4831
4832- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4833 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4834 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4835 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4836 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4837
4838- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4839 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4840 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4841
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004842C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004843-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004844
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004845- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4846 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4847
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004848New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004849-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004850
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004851- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4852 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4853
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004854Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004855-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004856
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004857- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4858 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4859 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4860 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4861 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4862
4863- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4864 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4865 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4866 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4867
4868- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4869 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4870
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004871Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004872-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004873
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004874- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004875 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4876 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004877
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004878
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004879What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4880===========================
4881
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004882*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4883
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004884Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004885----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004886
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004887- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4888 big to represent as a C double.
4889
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004890- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4891 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4892 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4893 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4894 restriction).
4895
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004896- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4897 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4898 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4899 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4900 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4901
4902 >>> dir([])
4903 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4904 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4905 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4906 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4907 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4908 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4909 'reverse', 'sort']
4910
4911 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4912
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004913- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004914 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4915 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4916 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4917 OverflowError exception.
4918
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004919- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004920 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004921 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4922 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4923 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4924 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4925 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004926 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004927 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4928 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4929
4930 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4931 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4932 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4933 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004934
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004935- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004936 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4937 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4938 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4939 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4940 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4941 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4942 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4943 once it is created.
4944
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004945- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4946 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4947 (key, value) pairs.
4948
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004949- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004950 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4951 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4952
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004953- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4954 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4955 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4956 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4957 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004958
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004959- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004960 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4961 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4962
4963 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4964
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004965- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004966 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4967
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004968Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004969-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004970
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004971- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004972 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4973 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004974
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004975- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4976 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4977 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4978 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4979 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4980 in this area anymore).
4981
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004982- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4983 threading.Timer.
4984
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004985- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4986 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4987
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004988- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004989 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4990
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004991- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004992 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4993 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4994 converted to Python longs.
4995
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004996- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004997 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4998
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004999- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5000 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5001 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5002
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005003Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005004-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005005
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005006- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5007 division operators as per PEP 238.
5008
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005009Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005010-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005011
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005012- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5013 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5014 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5015 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5016
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005017C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005018-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005019
5020- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005021
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005022- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5023 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005024 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005025
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005026 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5027 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005028 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005029 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005030
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005031- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005032 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5033 module:
5034
5035 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005036
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005037 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5038 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005039
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005040 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5041 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005042
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005043 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5044
5045 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5046
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005047- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005048 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5049 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5050 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005051
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005052New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005053-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005054
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005055- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5056 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5057 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5058 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5059 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005060
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005061Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005062-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005063
5064Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005065-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005066
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005067- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5068 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5069 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5070 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005071 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5072 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5073 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5074 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5075 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005076
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005077- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005078 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5079
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005080
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005081What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5082===========================
5083
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005084*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5085
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005086Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005087-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005088
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005089- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5090 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5091
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005092- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5093 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5094 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005095
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005096- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5097 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5098 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5099 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005100
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005101- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5102
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005103- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005104
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005105Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005106-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005107
5108- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005109 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005110 the module docstring for details.
5111
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005112Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005113-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005114
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005115- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005116 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5117 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5118 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005119
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005120- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5121 Nick Mathewson.
5122
5123Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005124----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005125
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005126- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5127 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5128 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5129 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5130 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5131 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5132 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5133 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5134
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005135- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5136 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5137 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5138 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5139
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005140- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5141 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5142 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5143 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5144 come a long way).
5145
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005146- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5147 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5148 write filters for these warnings).
5149
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005150- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5151 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5152 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5153 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5154 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5155
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005156- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5157 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5158 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5159 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5160 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5161 older distribution.
5162
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005163Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005164-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005165
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005166- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5167 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005168 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005169
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005170- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5171 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5172 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5173
5174- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5175
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005176- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5177
5178- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5179
5180- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5181
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005182- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005183
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005184- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5185
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005186New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005187-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005188
5189C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005190-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005191
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005192- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5193 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5194 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5195 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5196 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5197 against buffer overruns.
5198
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005199- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005200 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5201 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005202 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5203 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5204 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5205
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005206- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5207 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5208 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5209 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5210 deprecated.
5211
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005212Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005213-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005214
5215- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5216 relevant is found.
5217
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005218
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005219What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005220===========================
5221
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005222*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5223
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005224Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005225----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005226
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005227- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5228 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5229 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5230 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5231 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5232 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5233 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5234 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005235 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005236 repaired.
5237
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005238- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005239 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005240 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5241 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5242 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5243 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5244 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5245 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5246 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5247 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5248
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005249- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5250 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5251 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5252 leading BMO character).
5253
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005254- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5255 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5256 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5257
5258 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5259 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5260 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005261
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005262 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5263 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5264 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5265 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5266 for various simple to use conversions.
5267
5268 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5269 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5270
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005271 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5272 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5273 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5274 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5275 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5276 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5277 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5278 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5279 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5280 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5281 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5282 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5283 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5284 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5285 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005286
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005287- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5288 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5289 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005290 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005291 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005292
5293 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005294 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5295 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5296 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5297 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5298 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005299 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5300 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005301
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005302 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5303 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5304 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005305 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005306
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005307- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5308 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5309 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5310 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5311 floating arithmetic,
5312
5313 x = 9007199254740992.0
5314 print long(x)
5315
5316 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5317 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5318 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5319 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5320 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5321 functions are of good quality).
5322
5323 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5324 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5325 algorithms to break.
5326
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005327- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5328 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5329 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5330 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5331 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5332 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5333 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5334 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5335 order.
5336
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005337- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5338 operation along the most common code paths.
5339
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005340- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5341 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5342
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005343- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5344 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5345 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5346 {}.update(UserDict())
5347
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005348- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5349 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5350 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5351 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5352 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5353 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5354 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5355 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5356
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005357- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005358 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005359
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005360 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005361 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5362 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005363 join() method of strings
5364 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005365 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5366 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005367 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005368 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005369
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005370- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5371 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5372
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005373- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5374 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5375
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005376- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5377 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5378 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5379 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5380
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005381- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5382 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005383 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005384 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5385 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005386
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005387- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5388
5389
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005390Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005391-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005392
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005393- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005394 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005395 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5396 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5397
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005398- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5399 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5400
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005401- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5402 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5403 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5404 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5405
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005406- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5407 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5408 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5409
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005410- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5411
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005412- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5413
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005414- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5415 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5416 that are still imported into string.py).
5417
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005418- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5419
5420- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5421 Now it does.
5422
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005423- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5424
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005425- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5426 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5427 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5428 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5429 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005430 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5431 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005432
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005433- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5434 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5435 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5436 'help(object)'.
5437
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005438Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005439-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005440
5441- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005442 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005443 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5444 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5445
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005446- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005447 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5448 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005449
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005450C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005451-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005452
5453- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5454 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005455
5456----
5457
5458**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**